New exhibition addresses the US opioid epidemic

This spring it will be 30 years since arguably the greatest rock star of the 1990s died. On April 5, 1994, Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain shot himself with a shotgun after a heroin overdose.

His farewell letter, with the famous words “It’s better to burn out than to fade away”, preserved the idea of ​​the morbid grunge era for eternity and at the same time marked the transition into a crisis that continues to this day.

In 1996, the notorious Sackler family and their pharmaceutical company “Purdue” brought the drug OxyContin onto the market as a “safe” painkiller. The family aggressively pushed for the deregulation of opioids, which massively promoted the use of OxyContin as a supposedly side-effect-free miracle pain medicine.

Today the company is bankrupt and the blame for the opioid crisis is being negotiated in the USA. Far too late, as shocking figures show: millions became addicted and last year hundreds of thousands of Americans died as a result of an overdose. This makes drug addiction the most common preventable cause of death for Americans under 50.

Dancing between poppies

Interestingly, it was artists who stirred up sentiment against the Sackler family. Last but not least, the photographer Nan Goldin: the award-winning documentary about her life “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” once again brought the topic to the forefront of the media last year. The 70-year-old artist, herself a former heroin and oxyContin addict, was a leader in the fight against the pharmaceutical company. At the end of the month the Neue Nationalgalerie is showing her extensive work.

And the magazine “The Opioid Crisis Lookbook,” founded in the States in 2019, is also a response to the ongoing epidemic. The creators, Dustin Cauchi and Dasha Zaharova, aimed to document and reinterpret the crisis by focusing on marginalized narratives, for example by attempting to destigmatize addiction.

With the help of Berlin-based curator Samuel Stables, they have been giving an insight into their work since last Friday. “You Can Only Kill Us Once” is the name of an exhibition that will only be located for a few weeks in the “Trauma Bar and Cinema” nightclub, not far from Berlin Central Station.

In addition to works by Zaharova and Cauchi, works by Liam Denhamer and installations by the architect Juvenilia, who was inspired by Kurt Cobain’s scenographic drawings, will be shown. The exhibition is advertised as an “immersive neo-grunge experience” that invites visitors into the magazine universe.

Retro high gloss aesthetic

At the opening last Friday, some musicians, including the Berlin artist Tobias Spichtig, played on a stage framed by a meadow decorated with poppy blossoms. This is unmistakably the music video of the Nirvana song “Something In The Way”, translated as an accessible backdrop.

The numerous very young visitors who danced in the poppy meadow largely looked as if they had come from the grunge era and inadvertently contributed to the generally gloomy mood: torn black clothing, disheveled hairstyles, deathly pale make-up. It may have been Halloween or not, some people even resorted to using fake blood to add a little more shock.

You can’t blame the early 20-year-olds for putting a macabre face on the thousands of drug victims that this “party” wants to remember. The fashion industry mercilessly exploited the so-called “heroin chic”, as a commercial interpretation of grunge, back in the early 90s and to this day still refers to the style that was actually declared dead at the turn of the millennium.

The exhibition itself is worth seeing, but the immersive experience is less shocking than it is transfiguring the very hip retro aesthetic. The fact that the curators are responsible for a glossy magazine may be one explanation.