Events
English / Deutsch

9.5.2008 | Akademie der Künste (Hanseatenweg), Berlin

Cop Talk

Project presentation by Chris Evans

For a country to have an effective police force, its employees should reflect the demographics of society. It is perhaps inevitable that members of arts communities are underrepresented in police forces. In response to this, the artist Chris Evans has invited representatives from national police forces to give presentations at art academies in Europe, illustrating the opportunities in such a career and encouraging students to join. On one level, the work gently punctures the idealism of art schools—ultimately only a small proportion of art and design students eventually pursue a career directly linked to their studies. It also introduces the implicit contrast between jobs that have an overt social function (police) and those that are commonly thought not to (artist). But ultimately, by bringing the artist into the police force, it suggests that nonvocational and creative thinking could enrich the creativity, thought production, value, and ethics of the most surprising sections of society.