Jean Peters (Peng!)
area: Media Art, political Mobilization
Key Facts
nationality
Germany, Francearea
Media Art, political Mobilizationresidence
Berlinrecommending institution
frei_raum Q21 exhibition spacetime period
March 2018 - April 2018Jean works for a major international publishing house that should not be named here. She is quick in thought, elegant in gestures, romantic in morals and deep in eye-to-eye looks. Instead of finishing her business degree at the University of Alabama Business School, she chose to invest her time into repeated public humiliation of the local Ku Klux Klan. When they finally dissolved, she migrated to Europe and landed up in Berlin heading up the Peng! Division on bureacracy. She is also an excellent cook of Mongolian cuisine.
Peng is an explosive concoction of activism, hacking and art battling the barbarism of our time. Be it the weapon industry, the state-industrial intelligence complex, oil and energy magnates like Shell or Vattenfall or right-wing radical parliamentarians of the AfD, no one is safe, when they launch their PR machineries and tools of infiltration.
They work in decentralised action groups and take all the means into their hands to fight evil that they can find – be it legal loopholes, technical machine codes or whipped cream. Art serves as an aesthetic reflection room and as burning barricades in the courtrooms, investigative research methods as legitimatory basis for direct actions and to identify the weak points of political opponents, the internet as a basis for spreading penguin GIFs (an endangered species with which they deeply identify themselfs) and the darknet to order alpaca socks when they work overtime in an unheaded office.
They favor collectivism, the concept of the polymorphous worker, concrete universalism and free association before property, specialisation, closed identities and the state. Solidarity with the oppressed and the destruction of hegemonic conglomerates are also amongst their favourites. And art, yes, the arts!