A THEATRE OF CAPTURE 

The title sounds less like the name of an exhibition than a command already lodged in the culture. And, so it is, in more ways than one; the slogan “Resistance is futile” references the famous Borg line from “Star Trek”. The exhibition does not simply dispute that command; it builds an environment in which the visitor can experience how persuasion becomes difficult to resist: not because propaganda has grown louder, but because it has become smarter and more ubiquitous. It presents itself as pleasure, style, participation and entertainment.  

One of the exhibition's governing insights is that the old distinction between political manipulation and commercial seduction has disappeared. The slogan, the brand, the meme, the campaign image, the music video and the weapons interface increasingly address us in the same visual and emotional language. Cruel American hymns by the likes of Toby Keith or Russian synthetic stadium pop performed by the singer Shaman have one thing in common: they turn the hook, the beat, the guitar solo or the glam rock music video into a nationalist loyalty oath.  

Israeli genocide drill and hip-hop songs carry exterminatory rhetoric and turn tribal cruelty into viral tracks. Here, propaganda is not merely believed: it is danced and sung, becomes part of a total propagandistic environment. Resistance is futile: the beat does not accompany the command; it enters the body and dictates the moves.  

René Lindner’s intervention gives this proposition architectural form. The exhibition is not arranged as a sequence of self-contained objects in a neutral gallery. Courtyard, passage, shooting booth, display cabinet, and darkened chapel press against one another. The visitor changes roles with each spatial turn: consumer, reader, player, believer, shooter, witness, accomplice. In this respect, the installation belongs to the history of the total environment — from Kurt Schwitters's “Merzbau” to the socially saturated installations of Edward and Nancy Kienholz and Ilya Kabakov's formulation of the 'total installation'. Meaning is generated not only by individual images, but by accumulation, adjacency, and the bodily route through them. 

Lindner borrows the church's technologies for representation of the sacred — procession, icon, relic, altar and the constantly occurring triptych — while refusing its promise of absolution. The exhibition also rejects the white cube's fiction that images can be isolated from the systems that produce and monetise them. Its density is closer to a Baroque chapel, a fairground, a political rally and an algorithmic feed: environments in which attention is directed before judgment has time to form. 

POP AND PROPAGANDA AFTER POP 

Pop Art recognized that modern power had migrated into reproducible surfaces. Richard Hamilton's inventory of post-war consumer desire and Andy Warhol's serial celebrities and commodities did not merely import popular imagery into art; they showed that repetition, packaging, and circulation were already organizing perception. Lindner builds on that historical achievement, but his environment is no longer the stable, post-war division between the commodity image and the state poster. In the contemporary media environment, in which the leader, the product, the weapon and the influencer present with similar polish.  

Pop and propaganda no longer face one another as market and state. They converge as techniques of capture. Designer-toy bodies are militarized; an elaborate, hand-painted copy of a real Trump-themed Glock handgun is displayed like a luxury accessory. The Trump Glock is simultaneously firearm, souvenir, and fetish. Each piece interrogates how violence becomes palatable once it is packaged in the right way: as slogan, toy, luxury good, statistic, or interface. 

Drones float above a ruined building in a field of saturated pink and orange, a giant “Hasbara” graffiti spelling out Israeli word for propaganda awaits the visitor behind sacralised versions of superhero pop imagery at the entrance of the installation. These works use the speed of recognition against itself. They invite the eye before they disclose the moral content of what it has accepted. The works’ titles, sometimes darkly ironic, sometimes laconic and coldly descriptive, enhance this effect. The ubiquitous, blandly repetitive imagery of pop and street art is weaponized and charged with meaning. 

The exhibition's repeated milk cartons bearing a distorted, gangster style of Western leaders Netanyahu and Merz are exemplary. The missing-person package, the Warholian grid, and the political portrait are compressed into a single serial device. The leaders are at once advertised, infantilized, aestheticized and placed under accusation. Karl Popper's book covers are overwritten with the blunt verdict 'This shit doesn't work'. The three works can only fully be understood as a triptych, which coldly reports on the failure of the West’s open societies in confronting a live-streamed genocide. 

And it is indeed the confrontation with the genocide, in the form of a report from the Israeli NGO B’Tselem, that is the central piece of the exhibition in the main room. Lindner does not fully retreat into cynicism, like Damien Hirst, for example, has done: he provides the QR code to the report accusing Israel of genocide; he provides the lending library installation with a selection of Popper’s work; and he provides space for the visitor to respond in the large interactive “Heine Machine” installation.  

Lindner's method belongs to the history of detournement: 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 hazard tape, and the iconic sunflower is covered by a sticker symbolising the resurgence of German militarism.  

A slogan of revolutionary possibility has become a prohibited cultural remnant, preserved and cordoned off. The Heine verse about the servant who sings of freedom in the tavern is presented as a participatory writing surface, with arrows, instructions and markers. Cultural authority is neither revered nor simply destroyed; it is returned to public handling, where it can be repeated, contradicted, 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 that capitalism should be understood not only as an economic system, but as a cult: continuous, without ordinary feast days, and productive of guilt rather than redemption. Benjamin's formulation sharpened a problem already opened by Max Weber's account of Protestant discipline and accumulation. Money, credit, and work do not merely organize material life; they acquire moral and metaphysical force. The German double meaning of “Schuld” — debt and guilt — sits at the centre of this insight. 

Lindner does not illustrate Benjamin as doctrine. He asks what the cult looks like after finance, branding, celebrity, and digital technology have fused. Accumulation becomes less a practical means than a defence against contingency and death, while its sacrifices are displaced onto labour, community, nature and distant bodies. At the core, the exhibition is a meditation about human hubris, the ever-present temptation of modern man to play God. The forms of devotion migrate into secular objects. Repetition becomes litany. The screen becomes icon. The vitrine becomes reliquary. The slogan becomes commandment. The stock, the dollar, the leader, the weapon and the promise of technological supremacy occupy places once reserved for saints, relics and providence. 

This logic is very apparent in the large triptych that combines militarised national emblems, patriarchal authority, erotic display, demonic imagery, the dollar and the visual grammar of the casino. It draws on American low-rider and tattoo art aesthetics, while incorporating an updated version of a classic John Heartfield poster from pre-WW2 Germany, indicating the line of tradition Lindner sees himself in. Its structure recalls an altarpiece or Last Judgment, but salvation has been reorganised as a jackpot. The good life appears as an accumulation of force, status, sexual entitlement and monetary sovereignty. The casino border is not decoration added to theology; it is the theology. Chance, reward and ruin are presented as the governing order of the world. 

The exhibition's critique also reaches the art system it stands completely apart from. The self-funded exhibition takes place in a privately-owned space, which frees it from the usual institutional constraints. It would be too easy to repeat the familiar complaint that contemporary art has abandoned beauty for theory. Lindner's installed work makes a narrower and more convincing charge: that theory, institutional neutrality and market value can become forms of insulation.  

The white cube can transform catastrophe into a category, and the art object can convert dissent into an asset. The target is not thought but thought used as anaesthesia; not the market as an external enemy, but the capacity of every critical gesture to return as branded cultural capital. Lindner’s work is heretical because it implicates its own status as spectacle and commodity.

THE VIEWER AS TARGET 

The courtyard shooting range is the exhibition's most direct mechanism of implication. A Cybertruck silhouette carrying the slogan 'Do Alpha Male Shit' appears beside 'Finish Them', quoting Nikki Haley’s infamous adaptation of the “Mortal Kombat” injunction to brutally kill a disabled opponent. Stylised gun-club aesthetic and a sequence of targets that moves from abstract bull's-eye to hooded and distorted human-like faces make the spectator walk along the stages of dehumanization. At the end stands a mirror. The visitor is not allowed to remain outside the apparatus of targeting; the target returns the gaze. The message is simple, but powerful: The dehumanizer will end up dehumanized.  

The art-historical precedent is Niki de Saint Phalle's Tirs of the early 1960s, in which the artist and invited participants fired at plaster reliefs containing bags of pigment. Those works joined aggression, spectacle and painterly production: the shot released colour and completed the work. Lindner retains the fairground excitement but removes the promise of catharsis. Shooting here does not liberate matter from the picture. It demonstrates the short distance between image, game and dehumanization. The bodily pleasure of aiming is not condemned from a safe moral distance; it is staged and then folded back upon the participant. 

That structure recurs throughout the installation. 'HUMAN SHIELDS' is manufactured as monumental lettering, as though a phrase used to distribute responsibility for civilian death had become an industrial product. At the same time, the “Covered Graffiti” installation is a comment on the repressive political climate in Germany: the artist covers the politically incisive graffiti with human shields to avoid legal repercussions. 

The memorial image for Aaron Bushnell interrupts this economy of distance with a named person and an act of self-destruction undertaken in protest. Its place in the exhibition is deliberately uncomfortable. It cannot be absorbed as another witty detournement, yet neither can it be treated as uncomplicated martyr imagery. It marks the point at which witness becomes bodily sacrifice and raises the question the rest of the exhibition keeps postponing: what does refusal cost when the surrounding system is designed to metabolize every gesture into content? 

THE DANGEROUS WORK OF BEAUTY 

POP AND PROPAGANDA is visually excessive, often funny and frequently beautiful. That beauty is not a decorative concession to difficult content. It is one of the exhibition's central problems. Propaganda has always understood that conviction is rarely produced by argument alone. Colour, rhythm, glamour, erotic charge, repetition and compositional clarity make an idea emotionally durable. To insist that truth and beauty are simply identical would ignore this history. Lindner's stronger wager is that beauty is a contested instrument: the same power that disguises violence may also hold the viewer before an image long enough for the disguise to fail. 

The drone painting makes this wager explicit. A ruined building is rendered in hard black and yellow against a luxuriant pink-orange sky while unmanned aircraft hover above it. The image is immediately desirable as an object. Its palette belongs to Pop, fashion and the decorative interior; its subject belongs to surveillance and remote killing. A manipulated photograph of a charred mask found in Hiroshima similarly compresses nuclear catastrophe into the format of a souvenir or commercial print. The ethical risk is obvious: atrocity can be made attractive. The exhibition does not solve that risk. It makes it visible as the condition under which contemporary war is already consumed. 

In this respect Lindner works against the moral comfort of ugliness. An ugly anti-war image can reassure the spectator that violence belongs elsewhere, clearly marked as repellent. These works deny that reassurance. They approach the older category of the sublime, in which terror is converted into aesthetic intensity, but they remove the secure distance on which the classical sublime depended. The drones are not storms or mountains; they are manufactured systems, linked to decisions, markets and screens. The terror is humanly organized, and the beauty is part of its delivery mechanism. 

The exhibition therefore advances a tragic rather than utopian understanding of the human animal. It assumes that appetite for status, tribal identification, imitation and domination coexist with empathy, fairness and the capacity for self-limitation. There is no promise of a purified 'New Man'. The visitor is asked to recognize that propaganda succeeds not because it is imposed on an innocent public, but because it recruits existing human predispositions.  

THE SMOOTH IMAGE 

Artificial intelligence enters at this point not as a separate theme but as the ideal technical medium of the pop-propaganda merger. Earlier photomontage, from Hannah Höch and John Heartfield onward, often made contradiction visible through the cut: incompatible realities collided at the seam. AI synthesis can make the seam disappear. The implausible returns with the fluency of a finished commercial image. A tattooed statesman, a toy rabbi, and a cute Reaper drone figure can be made equally coherent, equally polished and equally available for circulation. 

Lindner uses this capacity rather than pretending to stand outside it. AI is both tool and subject, a collaborator whose facility becomes evidence. The issue is not that machine-made images lack a mystical human essence. It is that frictionless plausibility weakens the visual cues by which construction, manipulation and responsibility were once detected. Smoothness becomes ideological when it encourages the eye to accept before the mind asks how the image came to be, who benefits from it, or what has been excluded. 

Nietzsche's figure of the Last Man clarifies this political promise. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the Last Man is not a tyrant but a creature of managed comfort, risk-aversion and diminished aspiration. AI's most persuasive political promise is likewise not domination but convenience: fewer decisions, less friction, optimized attention, simulated creativity, conflict translated into data. The machine does not have to threaten the subject who voluntarily exchanges judgment for ease. It soothes, predicts and completes. 

The exhibition is careful, at its best, not to oppose an authentic handmade realm to a corrupt digital one. Pop was already mechanical; propaganda has always borrowed the newest means of reproduction; the art market has long converted singularity into price. Lindner stages contamination rather than purity. The question is whether the mixtures - art and advertising, devotion and branding, protest and spectacle, war and entertainment - can still be made perceptible after their seams have been smoothed away.

“HOMO DEUS” 

The exhibition's theological and anthropological arguments converge in the “Homo Deus” installation. The title is accusatory, not celebratory. It names the fantasy that technological power has elevated the human being above its’ limitations, while the room demonstrates the opposite: a species capable of engineering unprecedented control remains morally primitive, dependent on sacrificial myths, tribal obedience and speculative idols. 

The installation combines a tattooed Asian figure on a cross, a triptych of demonic faces and nuclear explosions, an image of Kant carrying the injunction 'You are your brother's keeper', and a devotional image of Mary and Jesus recoded as 'Slutcoin, King of Crypto'. Electric candles and a video of a dancer performing before the apocalyptic triptych supply the only unstable light and movement. The room is deliberately difficult to inhabit. It works less like a collection of propositions than like a pressure chamber in which incompatible systems of belief are forced into proximity. 

The crucifix returns abstract sacrifice to a vulnerable body. Kant's moral philosophy is pulled toward the biblical question of responsibility for the other. Crypto speculation occupies the compositional place of devotional promise. Nuclear imagery turns the Last Judgment into a catastrophe produced not by divine intervention but by human technical capacity. Against these rigid emblems, the dancer introduces breath, fatigue, exposure and time.  

The moving body is the one element that cannot be reduced completely to symbol. But the human body itself is captured in the ritual dance in front of the false idol; “Homo Deus” is the darkest and most disturbing part of the total installation and makes the spectator wonder whether Frank Kozik, the famous American pioneer of poster and toy art, was right when he said: “It won, that dark side, the hedonism and anti-intellectual.” Lindner references this quote as part of his intervention and pays tribute to Kozik. 

“Homo Deus” is the exhibition's final argument because it reveals the unity beneath its apparently disparate materials. Capital, propaganda, AI and militarism all offer versions of mastery: over uncertainty, the future, the enemy, the body and death. The room answers that promise with a tragic reversal. The more absolute the system's claim to control, the more visible its dependence on archaic fear, sacrifice and obedience. Omnipotence culminates not in maturity but in moral infantilism.

A COUNTER-CHURCH WITHOUT ABSOLUTION 

The total installation uses the camouflage of as a sanctuary; the red colour used for the gate with the gothic windows is the colour of traditional church doors, promising a safe zone, a place of rest and safety.  It is a camouflage, however, a form of artistic bait and switch.  Lindner’s work does not offer refuge from contaminated images, and it does not offer the consolations of a new creed. Its function is closer to a temporary discipline of attention. By slowing images down, placing them in bodily sequence and allowing their seductions to remain active, the installation makes their commands audible. What normally passes in seconds through a feed is made to occupy space, demand movement and produce discomfort. 

The participatory wall, the directional signs, the shooting mechanism, the final transition into “Homo Deus” and the mixture of high and low forms all prevent spectatorship from settling into detached contemplation. The gallery becomes a forum only because it first becomes a site of implication. Dialogue is not presented as a sentimental cure. It is the modest political remainder after the exhibition has removed the fantasy of innocence. 

There are risks in this method. Some images come close to reproducing the erotic stereotypes, masculine fantasies and spectacular violence they seek to criticize.  Yet the work's force lies precisely in refusing the hygienic position from which critique imagines itself untouched by pleasure, commerce or tribal feeling. Lindner does not stand outside the visual economy he attacks. He enters it, exaggerates its attractions and turns its formats against one another. 

'Resistance is futile' is both slogan and hypothesis. The exhibition demonstrates why the sentence feels plausible without granting it the last word. Its heresy is not the announcement of an alternative absolute truth, but the refusal to let the existing absolutes remain invisible. No image here guarantees justice; no act of seeing cancels complicity. What Lindner has to offer is more limited and more demanding: a pause in automatic recognition, a space in which seduction can be examined without being denied, and the possibility that attention, speech and moral imagination may interrupt obedience before it hardens into fate.