Two local artists sell happiness in Brandenburg

Since teaming up for a joint exhibition in 2011, the two artists Niklas Nitschke and Vadim Zakharov have been working under the name OBAMAINBERLIN. The moniker invokes the pathos of Barack Obama’s speech before the Berlin Victory Column in 2008, when he was about to become a presidential candidate (“this is the moment...when we must renew freedom”). The two artists, however, work in the marginal Oder-Neisse region, at the border between Germany and Poland, in the shadows of an economy that demands attention and success. If their decision to work there is not mere escapism, there is a price to pay: they must deliver their own work to a space that cannot and will not receive it – because this space lacks the cultural preconditions, the requisite understanding, and the supporting structures to do so. What they get in return is the chance to experience the reality of their creativity in the very act of relinquishing it. This reality produces happiness, and this happiness is for sale in the Transactions exhibition in Zurich.