#5 Self-Brainwashing
Following presentations at the 2022 Venice Biennale and the 2025 San Francisco Art Week, Kunstverein Baden is proud to show Michail Michailov’s performance Self-Brainwashing.
Inspired by ’90s foam parties, the artist explores how whimsy, irreverence, and play might serve as effective strategies to detangle and dissolve societal and psychological indoctrination and mental conditioning. Performers in white protective suits become gradually enveloped in ethereal white foam, creating an environment that evokes bath time, mass-market advertising, and consumer culture. At first glance, foam may seem almost too trivial for the seriousness of the subject at hand—brainwashing. Yet this very triviality is precisely what makes it so compelling. The foam’s insubstantiality and impermanence underscore the fleeting nature of the ideological forces it represents. Ideology is rarely the product of forceful, violent indoctrination (though that is certainly part of it); more often, it operates on the level of suggestion, of the trivial and the banal, and of absorption into the everyday.
The spatial dynamics of Michailov's interactive work invite us to alter our own perception, (mis- and self-perception), and to go down a rabbit hole of existential inquiry: Where do I begin? Where do I end? Where do I come from and where am I going? Do I exist in the absence of my fellow human beings? How responsible am I to my surroundings? These questions become increasingly urgent in the age of AI, when human and computer interfaces are nearing the event horizon of singularity. Michailov describes the concept of Self-Brainwashing in computational terms, “like a hard drive deleting itself.” Further thickening the experience, Michailov collaborates with sound artists to create and play original compositions during the performance. Through a choreography of irreverent materiality and social constructions, Self-Brainwashing aims to create an intuitive yet mindful arena of wonder and play, where everyone can lose, or momentarily delete, the “self” whilst also finding themselves somewhere in the process.
Adapted from a text by Candace Huey (re.riddle)
Performances
June 20 and 21 at 5.30 p.m.
Who am I, who are we, how do we relate to one another, and what is our existence about? Michail Michailov
explores these fundamental human questions in drawings, videos, and performances, and in the process
stages his “self”, or rather its manifold variants, in installative settings that often refer to the respective
exhibition space. The purview of his own identity ranges from the microcosm of dust settled in his artist’s
studio to the landscape he navigates as a body. Michail Michailov’s artistic practice reads like a permanent
attempt to reflect the large in the small and, conversely, to discover the small as a pattern of the large. […]
The colors, materiality, patterns, and formal conditions of the natural or urban landscapes into which Michailov inscribes himself with ever new bodily configurations testify to the artist’s existence to the same degree as they make his body vanish. I am everywhere was the title of a previous exhibition by Michail Michailov. And indeed, he is everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
Franz Thalmair