JOY #2: Department Joy

JOY #2: Department Joy
Jack Hauser & Sabina Holzer 
Curator: Stella Rollig

Opening: July 17, 18.00 – 21.00
Midissage: August 21, 5.57 – 22:57 
Finissage: September 5, 18.00 – 21.00

Stella Rollig curates the second of five projects at 17(Joy), featuring artists Jack Hauser and Sabina Holzer. Whereas Adelina Luft’s inaugural exhibition centered on breaking away from conventional institutional frameworks and embracing collective joy, this next chapter turns inward—highlighting collaborative constellations grounded primarily in friendship.

Joy #2: Department Joy delves deeper into the ephemeral nature of the overarching dramaturgy, experimenting with diverse durational formats and the notion of performative sculpture. The project unfolds across three announced events and a series of unannounced, spontaneous happenings and occurrences within a setting that oscillates between work and workshop. Throughout, Jack Hauser and Sabina Holzer will engage artistic friends and collaborators to take part in shaping the unfolding experience.

“A departure of actions, dreams, traces, and speculations. The clothes on view act as agents—time-space companions guiding us through a multi-perspective future. They support joyful, uncanny explorations of the fault lines between performing and exhibiting art. Live art, lines, letters, and light imprints play with the stars. How might a ‘community to come’ emerge?” 
Jack Hauser & Sabina Holzer

 

  JOY #2: Department Joy

The other day, the algorithm of my podcast player whispered: You may also like… Nadia Asparouhova and her theory of a new subculture: art that does not obviously cross your path, cannot be taken in at a glance, and is neither designed for Instagram nor built to go viral. According to the podcast transcript, the coolest things happening are not necessarily in plain sight—not in blue-chip galleries, let alone in established institutions.

I haven’t listened to the podcast yet—maybe I never will. Instead, I thought: New subculture? Ms. Asparouhova seems to have discovered an art practice that has been dearest to my heart and has fuelled my curatorial work since I first started self-generating income in the art world exactly forty years ago.

Recently, the discourse has been dominated by art writers and interviewees lamenting superficiality, simplification, “woke” political streamlining, and commercial dominance in contemporary art. I’m with you, folks. I see far too much art that is superficial, easily digestible, Instagrammable and collectible—as well as shallow political slogans dressed up as artwork.
But there’s so much more out there. And this is what keeps me in the game.

Luckily, Jack and I crossed paths about a quarter century ago, and I met Sabina a few years later, just as their collaborative practice was intensifying. In June 2005, I found myself posing as The Drummer—drumsticks in hand—as part of a performance in a private apartment.
(Can we even call it a performance? There was no audience, as I recall—only participants, or rather a group of friends, acquaintances, and collaborators, each taking on roles from a script by Jack Hauser and David Ender, and acting through the night.)

Self-conscious practice. Creating Temporary Autonomous Zones (Peter Lamborn Wilson, aka Hakim Bey, envisioning these as a kind of uprising against state control). Companionship. Confidentiality. Blurring the lines between partner, participant, public. Fantasy (yes), freedom (yes), fluidity.
It’s this attitude I wish to bring to 17(Joy).

The Reclaim the Streets protest movement, which began in the late 1990s, owes much to Hakim Bey’s ideas. I remember shouting “Wi-der-stand!” (Re-sis-tance!) in the weekly protest marches against Austria’s government coalition between the conservative ÖVP and the extreme right FPÖ, starting in early 2000.
While I will still shout in the streets when the occasion calls for it, in this contemporary moment, I find resistance in art practices that—yes—might indeed be newly coined as subculture.
Much like history, which forcefully returned after its supposed end (Francis Fukuyama, 1989/1992), subculture may not be as “over and out” as conventional historiography claims.

Try googling Jack Hauser (you’ll have more success with Sabina Holzer), and you’ll soon find yourself stranded amid sparse traces and a labyrinth of short dead ends masquerading as Jack’s homepage.
Don’t mistake this for idleness. This guy deliberately stays beneath the radar of the widely worshipped culture of online visibility—so often mistaken for universal relevance.

Even for an old friend like me, it’s hard to keep track of the manifold projects and alliances Jack and Sabina generate—together, in collaboration with others, and through their individual practices.
It’s impossible to absorb all their publications, to watch every video sent by email or uploaded to YouTube.
(Yes, there is a permanent online presence—albeit a hidden one. You’d have to know the name of the channel to find it.)

Their work—like Department Joy—often overflows with references, materials, and a certain degree of incomprehensibility.
Fandom is key. (Department Joy evokes both the British cult TV series Department S [1969–70] and the American comic book series Dept. H by Matt Kindt [2016–2018].)
Equally key is their beautiful notion of “forming gangs”—Banden, in German. Not gang as in gang-robbery, but Bande as in Bande à part, the 1964 film by Jean-Luc Godard. Außenseiterbanden. Outsider gangs.
Gangs operate in secret. It’s no surprise, then, to find another of Jack’s projects called Secret Service.

For the time being, Department Joy arrives as an alliance of resistance—against the absence of joy in contemporary global governance.
Let’s become gang members.

Stella Rollig (July 2025)