Or Gallery Berlin in co-operation with Transmediale 2013 and the Embassy of Canada is pleased to present Slogans for the Early Twenty-First Century by Douglas Coupland, with the kind support of Daniel Faria Gallery.

This is an ongoing body of statements Coupland has been working on, in which he has made a consistent effort to “Try and isolate what is already different in the twenty-first century mind as opposed to the twentieth.” Many of these slogans – 80 will be shown at the gallery – have appeared in the Posthasteism manifesto conference in Beijing, summer 2012, organized by Shumon Basar, Joseph Grima and Hans Ulrich Obrist, as well as in the Armory Show, New York, 2012 and Coupland’s 2012 solo exhibition at the Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto. A version of these were also be included in Coupland’s Nuit Blanche Toronto installation, Museum of the Rapture, at Toronto City Hall, 2012.

Coupland states, “If you were to attach a stick to each of these slogans and carry them in the street, would they read as protest or would they read as complicit guilt? For example, twenty years from now, were I to look at a picture of someone holding up a slogan reading ‘being middle class was fun,’ would that read as heartbreaking prescience or as rational acceptance of a by-then sociological certainty?”

Douglas Coupland will have his first museum retrospective, Everywhere is Anywhere is Anything is Everything, opening at the Vancouver Art Gallery, summer 2014. The exhibition will be accompanied by the first extensive publication on Coupland’s visual practice. Coupland has also recently released a collection of essays, Shopping In Jail, with Sternberg Press.

Transmediale is a Berlin-based festival and year-round project that draws out new connections between art, culture and technology. The activities of transmediale aim at fostering a critical understanding of contemporary culture and politics as saturated by media technologies. In the course of its 27 year history, the annual transmediale festival has turned into an essential event in the calendar of media art professionals, artists, activists and students from all over the world. The broad cultural appeal of the festival is recognised by the German federal government who supports the transmediale through its programme for beacons of contemporary culture.