Quality Gifts

David Moser

Info: Sentimentality comes up short-change in an economy of kindness. Quality Gifts, exhibited at BPA Gallery, Köln, proposes a confrontation with the faithful adage concerning the body as the vessel for the spirit. The vessel, as proposed by David Moser, is the body standardized and the spirit made bankrupt in the wake of one-time-use society. With the installation of Quality Gifts, Moser reenacts daily exchanges between the body and devices of category and dissemination by presenting the intimate proof of their transactions. Capturing and reenacting the body in the process of being approximated for size, length, means of celebration, disease status and refreshment, to reveal a terrible average between the units of measure; Moser creates a dark kaleidoscope of self-reflexive signifiers, which refer to a variable arbitrary while cannibalizing precious relations into commodity. In Quality Gifts (2022), labor becomes indistinguishable from the physical operations of life, made clear from the work central to the exhibition – in which a row of red balloons, first erect with breath and increasingly dogged and flaccid throughout the course of the exhibition, reflect their image in mean sheets of glass – as witness to their own deterioration. (…)