Dr. Klaus Schaffner, a board member of the Friends of the GfZK, has established the prize in 2009 in order to fund the projects of the volunteers that respectively work with a scholarship from the Cultural Foundation of Saxony for one year in the GfZK.
Most recently, Meehye Lee concluded the Stipdenidum with the exhibition I Do What You Do What They Do.
The influence of social media on individual life and behaviour is enormous today. Posts and feeds constantly convey news and reproduce uniform (self-)representations. There is a constant battle for attention and recognition, and at the same time the pressure to keep up with everyone else and the fear of missing out grow.
Meehye Lee, who lives in South Korea, has been investigating the influence of social media on communication and consumer culture since the 2010s. She collects and categorises posted images and visualises behaviours that follow social media trends. Lee’s work shows us that certain places are popular mainly because they circulate en masse in pictures on the relevant channels, and not so much because of their uniqueness or history. Such a hip selfie background quickly becomes a must-visit site and the selfie a proof of a perfect life.
For her new production National-d, Lee has recreated a selfie hotspot currently popular in South Korea at the GfZK. She invites visitors to take a photo of themselves in this artificial environment and gives them “10 useful tips for the coolest selfie settings”. Lee thus addresses the difficulty of wanting to belong to a society or group while at the same time maintaining individuality. Her new work raises several questions: How far do I want to go to look good in social media images? What is still real in the stagings in these media? And above all: can I free myself at all from the desire to do what everyone else seems to be doing?