Archive · 2024
Davos Orgone Device
Exhibition
The exhibition documents how the Center for Planetary Self Defense, the artist duo Mathias Kessler and Jakob S. Boeskov, travelled to the Jakobshorn in January 2024 to install an artistic homage to the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich in the mountains above the World Economic Forum in Davos.
The artists carried all materials on skis. Their base was a mountain hut at 1,800 metres, reachable only by ski lift. On view are drawings, expedition clothing, photographs and the Orgone Device sculpture installed in the snow during the World Economic Forum, together with a short video of the performative intervention.
Wilhelm Reich, author of The Mass Psychology of Fascism, was a psychoanalyst, inventor and writer. He left Europe in 1939 and later lived in the United States, where he died in prison in 1957.
Artists
Jakob S. Boeskov
lives and works in New York. His practice spans drawing, 3D printing, text, music, painting, sculpture and video. His work has been shown at the New Museum (New York), Frankfurter Kunstverein, Stedelijk Museum and the National Gallery of Denmark.
Mathias Kessler
(b. 1968, Austria) works across photography, installation and digital media on a critique of the Romantic image of nature. MFA, School of Visual Arts, New York. Exhibitions include Kunsthal Rotterdam, Kunsthaus Graz, Kirchner Museum Davos, Columbus Museum of Art and ERES-Stiftung Munich. Lives and works in Frankfurt am Main and New York. Founder of Pi (π) Art Project.