A sculptural light installation made of preserved and suspended potatoes. This composition of many different potato varieties addresses the gradual loss of crop diversity that took place in Europe from the 1930s onwards, in which most potato cultivars were led to extinction due to selection processes motivated by intensive farming and profit. The “Austria Blue” is a rare, blueish potato that could not withstand the pressure of uniformity and was deemed vulnerable and economically unviable, thus eliminated from conventional agriculture. Fortunately, organizations like the Basel-based foundation ProSpecieRara are committed to preserving old varieties and continue to cultivate potatoes like the “Austria Blue.”

Jacob Ott (b.1992, Dorfen, Germany, lives and works in Basel) uses various media - from sculpture, object, painting and installation to film, music, sound and performance. In his works, he examines locally specific cultural assets and everyday practices popularised in the context of globalisation. Meanwhile, he reflects on the semantic and practical transformation of cultural techniques through massification, standardisation and institutionalisation using biographically significant and currently prominent examples. To this end, he develops independent, but also context-specific artworks as well as works and exhibition formats that form a new context for other artworks. His often satirised depictions of cultural-technical practices and products address their latently inscribed paradoxes, dysfunctionalisms and absurdities in an amusingly critical manner. However, he is not primarily concerned with consistent cynicism or the systematic disappointment of technological fantasies of progress. Rather, he searches for new narratives, approaches and ways of dealing with a crisis-ridden present in a mode of irritation and overstretching, in which the contemporary subject seems to find itself lurching between powerlessness, resignation and indifference.