Artist
Christian Jankowski
Christian Jankowski, born in 1968 in Göttingen, studied at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg. He lives and works in Berlin. His conceptual and media-based practice is built on performative interactions between himself and professionals outside the art world—magicians, politicians, television presenters, or members of the Vatican.
These collaborations offer insight into popular understandings of art while questioning lifestyles, rituals, and the society of spectacle. He has participated in the Venice Biennale (2013) and the Yokohama Biennale (2017), and served as curator of Manifesta 11 in Zurich (2016).
Die Jagd (The Hunt)
Die Jagd (The Hunt) marks one of Christian Jankowski’s earliest performative works and forms part of a critical reflection on contemporary consumption patterns. For a week, the artist roams a supermarket armed with a bow and arrows, eating only the products he “hunts” directly from the shelves. This absurd installation subverts the traditional codes of hunting and transposes them into an entirely artificial environment: that of mass retail.
By reenacting the hunter’s gestures in a standardized, sanitized space, Jankowski creates a tension between two opposing realities: that of so-called “natural” survival and that of industrial consumption. Food products : packaged, labeled, and ready to eat, suddenly take on a violent and concrete dimension. Slaughtering a frozen chicken or piercing a block of butter amounts to symbolically reintroducing the act of killing, which is usually erased from our societies.
The work thus questions our relationship with food, particularly meat, whose animal origin is often rendered invisible. It also highlights the absurdity of consumerist logic: despite the artist’s dramatic action, the system remains unchanged. At the checkout, the products are simply scanned, arrows still stuck in them, amid total indifference. This moment underscores the commercial system’s ability to absorb any form of deviation or criticism.
Through this performance, Jankowski plays with the cliché of the “starving artist” and subverts the codes of heroic survival.
