Annette Kelm

Percent for Art

Annette Kelm’s Percent for Art is seemingly concerned with “art enrichment” by state or city arts agencies role in it, managing the artist rosters, maintaining public art collections, commissioning artworks, selecting installation sites, among other things for aesthetic and cultural enhancement in both public and private real estate developments. For some, it’s also an opportunity to have desperately needed revenue to counter the displacement of artists and preserve a city or state’s creative spirit. The work, with its serial repetition of percentage signs across six separate bright red panels, appears as splashy retail signage for no apparent sale. Its apparent emptiness reflects the limited documentation that we have of private developments, in which public information is missing and there’s no way to evaluate overall if percent for art programs are achieving its goals. The photographic works of the Berlin-based artist Annette Kelm often feature a single, vaguely familiar object, which she renders using a direct and realistic style that oscillates between genres, such as documentary and advertising. She makes series revolving around these objects, pressing the relationship between photography and sculpture—her work moves between the creation of images and the recording of a staged object or objects—in order to unfold her subject’s social, economic, and cultural context.