The exhibition WELTSCHMERZ shows new works by Serbian artist Igor Simic, which he
created in connection with his iOS game Golf Club: Wasteland. For this game he and his
award-winning gaming and film company Demagog Studio developed a whole world — a
storyline with characters and various landscapes — in a post-apocalyptic scenario. The eerie
atmosphere of the carefully crafted visual scenery is accompanied by slow paced, nostalgic,
sometimes almost chilling music that evokes the feeling of longing for something lost. The
letterings WELTSCHMERZ, YOLO, <3, DIGIDOPAMINE, ZUCK, etc. are taken from the
imagery of tall buildings that lie in ruins, but still have bright neon signs announcing what has
been western societies mantra and downfall.
It is a visionary cautionary tale of what will become of the earth we are living in now, where
most of us have died and only a few of the ultra rich fled to Mars and founded a new society,
Tesla City. Only to satisfy their nostalgia, the super rich fly to earth to play golf in the ruins of
what is left.
The words Igor Simic has chosen to make his statements are present in our popular culture,
in our every day lives and say more about our society than the actual wording. „Each neon
represents a phenomenon of contemporary politics and culture“, „whether it's Donald Trump,
Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon, Elon Musk, algorithms, DNA-engineering, anxiety“ — the
downfall of our society has already begun and is reflected in the game and in his artistic work
as these „millennial pink“ hypocrisy revealing statements.
This is the first solo show of Simic’s work at Galerie Anita Beckers, but it is not his first
appearance in Germanys art scene. In 2013 he won the Bloom Award, which was given at
the art.fair in Cologne each year and is now part of the program of Art Düsseldorf.
The following year he was chosen for the Berlinale Talents program and his work was
presented at GoEast in Wiesbaden, InterFilm Berlin, Kurzfilmfestival Köln. For two
consecutive editions, in the years 2015 and 2017, his work was included in the renowned B3
Biennial of the Moving Image, therefore also presented in Frankfurt. In 2018 his video work
was displayed at Kunsthalle Mainz in the exhibition Virtual Insanity.
Most recently, his work was shown at the 40th edition of the world’s leading technological
festival Ars Electronica 2019, where he presented five of his neons from the game Golf Club:
Wasteland.
For this exhibition at Galerie Anita Beckers he especially created two further works, now
exhibited for the first time.