Belastbar und sauber, dringend gesucht

Belastbar und sauber, dringend gesucht ("resilient and clean, urgently needed") is an audio-visual installation by Abhishek Thapar shown at Kampnagel, Hamburg, addresses the experience of many migrants and exiled people in Europe: Regardless of their own education, knowledge and experience, they often work in so-called 'unskilled' jobs – for example in hotels and restaurants, as kitchen staff and dish washers.  It is another project where art and design meet in a not-so-literal way. Visitors sit at a table and are served a menu, just like in a restaurant, but the menu lists the options of stories they can listen to. Around them, visuals and illustrations speak of the division and injustice in society.  What is not visible or audible to restaurant visitors, except when they happen to pass by the back entrances of these dining places, now becomes the subject of an audio installation for one spectator at a time. The style was deliberately contemporary and "clean", designed to appeal to a Western visual aesthetic, while the illustrations themselves were drawn on kitchen towels and toilet paper. The main poster image is a juxtaposition: a neatly folded restaurant napkin completely overpowering the small, dirty kitchen cloth beneath it. I created the identity design, illustrations and menu design, and art-directed the poster photoshoot.