“Pop and Propaganda – Resistance Is Futile.” The exhibition does not simply question this message; it creates a physical environment in which visitors experience it first-hand. The moment they pass through the red wooden gate, they are inside the artwork and can feel how it becomes ever harder to resist manipulation – not because propaganda has grown louder and more garish, but because it has become more intelligent and more pervasive. It presents itself as pleasure, rebellion, lifestyle and entertainment. Street art and graffiti, too, are part of this propaganda system and now merely feign artistic subversion and autonomy.

Resistance is futile: the subtitle comes from the television series “Star Trek”. The phrase sounds like a message already firmly anchored in the culture. In Germany especially, there is hardly any open resistance to the prevailing order. Instead, resentment is growing among a population that seemingly has only the choice between the militarisation of society by an unpopular government and the invocation of an ethno-nationalist rebirth by the neo-fascist opposition.

One of the exhibition’s guiding ideas is that the distinction between political manipulation and commercial seduction has vanished completely with the triumph of the large language models labelled “artificial intelligence”. The slogan, the brand, the meme, the campaign, the music video and modern religious imagery all use an increasingly similar visual and emotional language.

It is a process of vulgarisation that is most clearly visible at the centre of power: Donald Trump likes to post “AI”-generated images of himself late at night as the Pope, Jesus or Rambo; AI artefacts popular with “Christian Zionists” show Jesus returning on an Israeli tank or blessing American soldiers.

GLAM-ROCK VIDEOS AS NATIONALIST OATHS OF ALLEGIANCE

René Lindner’s intervention gives the thesis visual and architectural form. The exhibition is not laid out as a sequence of self-contained objects in a neutral gallery. Courtyard, passageway, shooting range, display case and darkened chapel crowd against one another. With every turn in the space, the visitor changes role: consumer, reader, player, believer, shooter, witness, accomplice. In this respect the installation takes its place in the history of the total installation – from Kurt Schwitters’ “Merzbau”, through the installations of Edward and Nancy Kienholz, to Ilya Kabakov, who coined the term “total installation” (rendered somewhat misleadingly in German as “Gesamtkunstwerk”).

Lindner’s work is not confined to the physical space of the gallery. By “pop” he means not only Pop Art, which has degenerated from ironic commentary into omnipresent decoration, but also the propagandistic content of popular music in all its forms. Bloodthirsty American country anthems by singers such as Toby Keith and Russian stadium pop performed by the singer “Shaman” have one thing in common: they turn the chorus, the beat, the guitar solo or the glam-rock music video into a nationalist oath of allegiance. The countless AI-produced songs and videos of wrathful Viking women made in Germany are preparing the ground for resentment to discharge itself in the country’s symbolic rebirth – an event that, according to Björn Höcke, will not come about without “well-tempered cruelty”.

In Israel – the country whose security is part of Germany’s Staatsräson, its reason of state, and whose ethnocracy serves as a model for the German neo-fascists – drill and hip-hop tracks carry genocidal propaganda and fantasies of annihilation, turning odes to tribal cruelty into viral hits. Here propaganda is not merely believed: it is danced and sung, and becomes part of a total propagandistic environment. Resistance is futile: the beat does not just accompany the command; it penetrates the body and dictates its movements.

In response, Lindner created a fictional band collective with the project “popandpropaganda” and produced the pop album “Edutainment”, whose songs have so far been streamed 120,000 times on Spotify. Hip hop, R&B, funk, soul, electro pop, country – the album’s songs work their way through the genres of American popular music, while the lyrics deal with the fascist seizure of power, the grotesque death throes of the American empire and US complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

On “Edutainment”, too, Lindner keeps his method of reconstruction for the sake of clarification, but steps further out of the ironic distance that he uses in the exhibition both as a shield against the repressive climate and as an indictment of Germany’s lack of freedom of expression. In the exhibition he repeatedly employs the method of concealment – of self-censorship – to show how narrowly the boundaries of German discourse are drawn.

POP AND PROPAGANDA: AFTER POP

Pop Art recognised that modern visual power expressed itself through control over reproducible surfaces. Richard Hamilton’s inventory of post-war consumer desires and Andy Warhol’s serial celebrities and consumer goods did not merely import popular imagery into art; they showed that repetition, packaging and circulation were already structuring perception. Lindner builds on this historical achievement, but his setting is no longer the stable post-war distinction between the advertising image and the political poster. Today’s media landscape has produced a situation in which political elites, the product and the influencer all present themselves in similarly slick, superficially positive ways.

Pop and propaganda no longer face each other as market and state. They merge into techniques of co-optation. In Lindner’s work, designer-toy figures are militarised; an elaborately hand-painted replica of a real Glock pistol with a Trump motif is presented like a luxury accessory. The Trump Glock is at once firearm, souvenir and fetish. Each work asks how violence becomes normalised once it is packaged the right way: as slogan, toy, luxury good, statistic or interface.

POP ART AS A WEAPON

Drones hover over a destroyed building in a field of rich pinks and oranges; a huge “Hasbara” graffiti piece, spelling out the Israeli term for propaganda, awaits the visitor behind sacralised versions of superhero pop images at the entrance to the installation. These works turn the speed of recognition against the viewer’s rationality. They draw in the eye before revealing the moral content of what it has already accepted.

The titles of the works – sometimes darkly ironic, sometimes laconic and coolly descriptive – reinforce this effect. The ubiquitous, bland imagery of pop and street art is thus weaponised and charged with meaning. Exemplary here are the milk cartons that recur throughout the exhibition, depicting the Western politicians Netanyahu and Merz in a distorted gangster style. The missing-person poster, the Warholian grid and the political portrait are condensed into a single serial device.

The politicians are at once advertised, infantilised, aestheticised and indicted. The covers of “The Open Society and Its Enemies”, the major work of the philosopher Karl Popper, are overlaid with the blunt verdict “This shit doesn’t work”. The three works can only be fully understood as a triptych that soberly reports on the failure of the West’s open societies to confront a livestreamed genocide in the Gaza Strip.

REVOLUTIONARY POSSIBILITIES AS FORBIDDEN CULTURAL RELICS

And indeed it is the engagement with the genocide, in the form of a report by the Israeli NGO B’Tselem, that forms the central element of the exhibition in the main room. Lindner does not retreat entirely into cynicism, as Damien Hirst, for instance, has done – an artist he quotes in the work “Unipolar Moment”. He provides the QR code for the report, stocks the lending-library installation with a selection of Popper’s works, and gives the visitor room to respond in the large interactive installation “Heine Maschine”.

Lindner’s method belongs to the history of détournement: the reuse of an existing sign in a way that turns its authority against the system that produced it. The Situationist promise “Sous les pavés, la plage!” – beneath the paving stones, the beach – is cordoned off with barrier tape, and the iconic sunflower is covered with a sticker symbolising the resurgence of German militarism.

A slogan of revolutionary possibility has become a forbidden cultural relic, preserved and cordoned off. Heine’s verse about the cowardly servant who raves about freedom only when drunk in the tavern is presented as a participatory writing surface, complete with arrows, instructions and markers. Cultural authority is neither revered nor simply destroyed; it is handed back to public use, where it can be repeated, refuted or damaged.

CAPITALISM AS RELIGION

The exhibition’s theological vocabulary is grounded in a specific modern tradition. In his 1921 fragment “Capitalism as Religion”, Walter Benjamin proposed understanding capitalism not merely as an economic system but as a cult: permanent, without ordinary holidays, and producing guilt rather than redemption. Benjamin’s formulation sharpened a problem already identified in Max Weber’s account of Protestant discipline and the accumulation of worldly goods. Money, credit and labour do not merely organise material life; they also acquire moral and metaphysical force. The double meaning of the German word “Schuld” – both financial debt and moral guilt – lies at the heart of this insight.

Lindner takes Benjamin’s idea as his premise and asks what the cult looks like once high and popular culture, the sacred and the profane, have merged in the digital medium. Endless accumulation is not defined here as rational economic activity; instead, it serves to ward off death and contingency. Capitalism, conceived as having no alternative, thus turns out to be not a technical rationality but an inescapable, blasphemous cult of immanence.

THE CASINO AS THEOLOGY

At its core, the exhibition is a meditation on human hubris – modern man’s ever-present temptation to play God. The forms of devotion migrate into secular objects. Repetition becomes litany. The screen becomes an icon. The display case becomes a reliquary. The slogan becomes a commandment. The share, the dollar, the president, the gun and the promise of technological salvation take the place once reserved for saints, relics and the divine.

This logic is especially evident in the large triptych that fuses militarised national emblems, patriarchal authority, eroticism, gambling aesthetics and sacred motifs. The work “Zeitenwende 2” draws on the aesthetics of American lowrider and tattoo art while incorporating an updated version of a classic John Heartfield poster from pre-Second World War Germany. Its structure recalls an altarpiece or the Last Judgement, but salvation has been reinterpreted as a jackpot. The good life appears as an accumulation of wealth, power, status and sexual gratification. The casino frame is not decoration added to the theology; it is the theology.

The exhibition’s critique is also aimed at the art system, from which it sets itself completely apart. The self-funded exhibition takes place in a converted rear-courtyard building that Lindner owns privately, which allowed him to work free of the usual institutional constraints. It would be too easy to repeat the familiar complaint that contemporary art has abandoned beauty in favour of theory. Lindner’s installation makes a narrower and sharper charge: that theory, institutional neutrality and market value can become forms of insulation.

The white-cube gallery can turn a catastrophe into a category, and the art object can turn dissent into profit. The aim is not to stimulate thought; rather, thought and abstraction function as anaesthetics, and the market appears not as an external enemy but as the medium that returns every critical gesture as branded cultural capital. Lindner’s work is heretical because it lays bare its own status as spectacle and commodity without pursuing any commercial intent. Whether a work is for sale depends solely on who the prospective buyer is.

THE VIEWER AS TARGET

The shooting range in the courtyard is the exhibition’s most direct mechanism of involvement. A Cybertruck silhouette bearing the slogan “Do Alpha Male Shit” appears next to “Finish Them”, quoting Nikki Haley’s notorious adaptation of the “Mortal Kombat” command to slaughter a defenceless opponent with creative brutality. A stylised shooting-range aesthetic and a sequence of targets that moves from abstract bull’s-eyes to masked and distorted humanoid faces lead the viewer through the stages of dehumanisation. At the end is a mirror. The visitor is not allowed to remain outside the apparatus of targeting; the target looks back. The message is simple but powerful: the price of dehumanisation is the loss of one’s own humanity.

The art-historical precursor is Niki de Saint Phalle’s “Tirs” from the early 1960s, in which the artist and invited participants fired at plaster reliefs containing bags of paint. These works combined aggression, spectacle and painterly production: the shot released the colour and completed the work. Lindner keeps the fairground atmosphere but removes the promise of catharsis. Here, shooting does not free matter from the picture. It shows how short the distance is between image, game and dehumanisation. The physical pleasure of taking aim is not condemned from a safe moral distance; it is staged and then turned back on the participant.

WHAT DOES REFUSAL COST?

This structure runs through the entire installation. “HUMAN SHIELDS” is staged as monumental lettering, as if an expression used to obscure responsibility for civilian deaths had become an industrial product. At the same time, the artist covers a politically pointed piece of graffiti with human shields in order to avoid legal consequences.

The memorial picture for Aaron Bushnell breaks through this economy of distance with a named person and an act of self-destruction carried out in protest. Its place in the exhibition is deliberately uncomfortable. It cannot be absorbed as yet another witty détournement, but nor can it be treated as straightforward martyr imagery. It marks the point at which testimony becomes bodily sacrifice, and it raises the question the rest of the exhibition keeps deferring: what does refusal cost when the surrounding system is designed to turn every gesture into content?

THE DANGEROUS POWER OF BEAUTY

The works are visually intense, sometimes funny, and often beautiful in a superficial way. This beauty is not a decorative concession to difficult content. It is one of the exhibition’s central themes. Propaganda has always understood that conviction is not produced by argument. Colour, rhythm, glamour, erotic tension, repetition and compositional clarity make an idea emotionally durable. To claim that truth and beauty are simply identical would be to ignore this history. Lindner’s bolder thesis is that beauty is a contested instrument: the same force that conceals violence can also hold the viewer in front of an image long enough for the camouflage to fail.

The drone picture makes this thesis plain. A destroyed building is rendered in harsh black and yellow against a lush pink-and-orange sky, while unmanned aircraft hover above. As an object, the picture is instantly desirable. Its palette belongs to Pop Art, fashion and interior decoration; its subject belongs to surveillance and killing at a distance.

A manipulated photograph of a charred mask found in Hiroshima similarly condenses nuclear catastrophe into the format of a souvenir or a commercial print. The ethical risk is obvious: cruelty can be made attractive. The exhibition does not resolve this risk. It makes it visible as the condition under which contemporary war is already consumed.

VARYING DEGREES OF VULGARISATION

In this respect, Lindner works against the moral comfort of ugliness. An ugly anti-war image can reassure viewers that violence happens elsewhere and is clearly marked as repulsive. These works withhold that reassurance. They approach the older category of the sublime, in which terror is transformed into aesthetic intensity, but through varying degrees of vulgarisation they undermine the safe distance on which the classical sublime relied.

The drones are not storms or mountains; they are man-made systems, connected to decisions, markets and screens. The horror is organised by people, and the superficial, cheap beauty is part of the mechanism by which it is transmitted. The exhibition therefore holds a tragic rather than a utopian view of the human animal.

Instead, it assumes that the drive for status, tribal belonging, imitation and domination coexists with empathy, fairness and the capacity for self-restraint. There is no promise of a purified “New Man”. Visitors are asked to recognise that propaganda succeeds not because it is forced upon an innocent public, but because it exploits existing human dispositions – and that its recipients bear responsibility for their own susceptibility to seduction.

THE SMOOTH IMAGE 

So-called “artificial intelligence” enters the picture not as a separate theme but as the ideal technical medium for the fusion of pop and propaganda. Earlier photomontage, beginning with Hannah Höch and John Heartfield, often made contradictions visible through the cut: incompatible realities collided at the seam. AI synthesis can make that seam disappear. The implausible returns with the polish of a finished advertising image. A tattooed statesman, a toy rabbi, a cute Reaper-drone figure can be produced professionally and put into mass production.

Lindner uses this capability rather than pretending to stand outside it. AI is both tool and subject, a collaborator whose skill becomes evidence. The problem is not that machine-generated images lack some mystical human essence. It is rather that frictionless plausibility weakens the visual cues by which construction, manipulation and responsibility were once recognised. Smoothness becomes ideological when it lures the eye into accepting something before the mind asks how the image came about, who profits from it, or what has been left out.

LESS FRICTION AND SIMULATED CREATIVITY

Nietzsche’s figure of the “Last Man” illuminates this political promise. In “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”, the Last Man is not a tyrant but a creature of managed comfort, risk aversion and misdirected ambition. AI’s most persuasive political promise is likewise not domination but convenience: fewer decisions, less friction, optimised attention, simulated creativity, conflicts translated into data. The machine has no need to threaten a subject who willingly trades judgement for convenience. It reassures, predicts and completes.

The exhibition is careful not to set an authentic, handmade world against a corrupt digital one. Pop was already mechanical; propaganda has always adopted the latest means of reproduction; the art market long ago converted uniqueness into prices. Lindner stages contamination rather than purity. The question is whether the blends – art and advertising, devotion and branding, protest and spectacle, war and entertainment – can still be made perceptible once their seams have been smoothed over.

THE DREAM OF CONTROL

The exhibition’s theological and anthropological arguments converge in the installation “Homo Deus”. The title is accusatory, not celebratory. It names modernity’s most seductive fantasy – that technological power has raised humanity above its limits – while the room demonstrates the opposite: a species capable of achieving unprecedented control over its environment remains morally primitive, dependent on sacrificial myths, idols and tribal identity.

The installation brings together a tattooed Asian female figure on a cross, a triptych of Lucifer and atomic explosions, a picture of Kant with the admonition “You are your brother’s keeper”, and a devotional image of Mary and Jesus reinterpreted as “Slutcoin, King of Cryptocurrencies”. Electric candles and a dance video are the only sources of light. The crucifix brings abstract sacrifice back to a vulnerable body. Kant’s moral philosophy is drawn towards the biblical question of responsibility for the Other. Cryptocurrency speculation takes the place of the pious promise.

Nuclear explosions turn the Last Judgement into a catastrophe caused not by divine intervention but by human action. Against these rigid symbols, the dancers bring breath, exhaustion, exposure and transience into play. The moving bodies are the only elements that cannot be reduced entirely to symbols. Yet the human body itself is captured in the ritual dance before the idol.

OMNIPOTENCE NOT AS MATURITY, BUT AS MORAL INFANTILISM

“Homo Deus” is the darkest and most disturbing part of the total installation, and it leaves the viewer wondering whether Frank Kozik, the celebrated American pioneer of poster and toy art, was right when he said: “It has won, this dark side, the hedonism and the anti-intellectualism.” Lindner takes up this quote as part of his intervention, thereby honouring Kozik as a visionary and trailblazer.

“Homo Deus” is the exhibition’s closing argument, because it reveals the unity behind the seemingly disparate works. Capital, propaganda, AI and militarism all offer variants of domination and control. It is the age-old human dream of escaping the “conditio humana” and gaining control over uncertainty, the future, the enemy, the body and death.

The room answers this promise with a tragic reversal. The more absolute the system’s claim to control, the more visible its dependence on archaic fear, egocentric fatalism and grudging obedience. Omnipotence culminates not in maturity but in moral infantilism.

A COUNTER-CHURCH WITHOUT ABSOLUTION

The exhibition disguises itself as a sanctuary: the red paint on the gate with its Gothic windows is the colour of traditional church doors and promises a protected zone, a place of rest and safety. But it is a disguise, a form of artistic bait-and-switch. Lindner’s work offers neither refuge from contaminated images nor the comfort of a new creed.

Its function is closer to a temporary disciplining of attention. By slowing images down, arranging them in a physical sequence and leaving their seductive power active, the installation makes their commands audible. What normally flows past in a feed within seconds is made to occupy space, demand movement and generate unease.

THE OFFER OF DIALOGUE

The participatory installation, the signposts, the confrontation with the genocide, the final passage into “Homo Deus” and the mixing of high and low art forms all keep spectatorship from settling into detached contemplation. The gallery has the potential to be a forum because it was first a place of involvement. Dialogue is not presented as a sentimental cure. It is the modest, political remainder once the exhibition has methodically dismantled fantasies of the viewer’s innocence. The invitation to dialogue is not meant only symbolically: the exhibition is open to the public for 155 hours, and Lindner himself will be present for half of that time.

“Resistance is futile” is at once slogan and hypothesis. The exhibition shows why the phrase feels plausible without granting it the last word. Its heresy lies not in proclaiming an alternative, absolute truth, but in refusing to let the existing dogmas remain invisible. No image here guarantees justice; no act of seeing cancels complicity. What Lindner offers is more limited and more demanding: an invitation to reflect, a place where seduction can be examined without being denied – and where, in this way, room for new insight opens up.

ABOUT THE ARTIST:

René Lindner is an author, photographer and the founder of www.language-and-skills.eu

He realised the exhibition concept in collaboration with artists, dancers and music producers from Germany, the USA, Ireland, Italy, Thailand, Mexico and Pakistan.