DAUT DINTJ DAUT HELT
limited edition flexographic-printed plastic bag (edition of 5000), each 22" x 14" x 6" / 55cm x 36cm x 15cm
DAUT DINTJ DAUT HELT is a plastic bag multiple, a knock-off of a popular knock-off plastic bag sold in Ukrainian public markets. The bag employs Ukrainian folk design and the oral Ukrainian / Russian Empire Mennonite language to rework the pirated BMW image, once again repositioning the national corporate logo onto a hand-held vessel for carrying. This series of plastic bags circulates like other plastic bags, distributed by commercial spaces for carrying purchased goods.
The bag’s imagery is reworked from a southeast Ukrainian pysanky design of stylized oak leaves and the eight-pointed star, evoking the oak tree and the sun as enduring forces. The text is written in the Mennonite language, a fading diasporic and non-standardized oral language from the former Russian Empire and Soviet Union. Visual and oral texts often sustain themselves through shifting forms, and the bag continues this, slipping across mediums and alphabets to stay buoyant, circulating, in motion.
The original knock-off bag pirates the BMW logo from the German multinational Bavarian Motor Works. The corporation’s logo is a knock-off itself, using an altered version of the Bavarian coat of arms banned from commercial use. This national emblem / national flag has sustained BMW since 1917, throughout the company’s use of concentration camp labor in military manufacturing during WWII to it’s luxury cars today. The desire for wealth and mobility held in the logo circulate internationally, present in a prominent BMW-branded plastic bag available for purchase in Ukrainian public markets, part of a small industry of knock-off designer plastic bags for daily market purchases or slightly fancy gifts. The contemporary roster of plastic bags now includes prints of traditional embroidery patterns, placing corporate logos next to stylized patterns that hold the residue of valuable regional rushnyks, textiles and texts. As a facsimile textile, the plastic bag contains, carries, and protects. It is used, stored, and re-used. It is a replicated text, invocation, and verse. It is <i>the thing that holds.</i>
The bag is being distributed with purchased items at galleries, art spaces, corner stores, and grocery stores until the edition runs out, utilizing the commercial exchange as the initial exhibition and distribution venue for the portable work. Organized with Danielle St-Amour, Art Metropole launched the bag at the Los Angeles ACID-FREE Art Book Fair in May of 2018, and featured it as their annual artist multiple artist bag at Art Basel in 2018, bringing it into circulation in the hypercapitalist art fair context. It has also been distributed-exhibited at the Graham Foundation Bookstore (Chicago), Kim's Corner Foods (Chicago), Phi Foundation for Contemporary Art (Montréal), Plug In ICA (Winnipeg), The Reach Gallery Museum and local MCC thriftstores (Abbotsford), Mennonite Heritage Archives (Winnipeg), and other corner stores and grocery stores across the northern Americas / Turtle Island, Germany and Ukraine.
