IN THE BACKGROUND YOU SEE A CLOSED DOOR BECAUSE YOU COULDN'T GET INTO SEE THE SHOW WITHOUT PAYING THAT AMOUNT. THE FEE WAS DEDUCTED FROM YOUR FIRST ARTWORK PURCHASE. Only the artist had that key the ONE THAT GOT YOU IN.

Merlin Carpenter’s „Heroes“ exhibition at the MD72 space in Berlin included a series of 14 „Heroes“ depicted in a caricature-like manner, each painted in oil and divided onto four separate canvases. But for the opening and the entire exhibition the paintings themselves and main show remained behind locked doors and were only accessible to viewers willing to pay a €5,000 Euro entry fee. If someone paid the entry fee but then bought a painting this was deducted. As a direct result of this concept only very few people had the privilege of seeing the exhibition. Opening attendees were frustrated they were denied access to the show and were confronted with an implication of elitism. This dramatic situation was underlined by the presence of security guards. But in Carpenter’s eyes there was a exhibition, but, due to the locked doors into the main rooms this only comprised the corridor, the back kitchen and the office. In the office was displayed a a pack of „Heroes“ custom playing cards showing all the paintings but cut up in a puzzle-like way, next to a bank card reader and a short text. So the works were to an extent actually visible. The packs of cards were also posted out as a preview and physically given away. Thereafter, the artist was the only person allowed to see the show without paying, so he himself invigilated the entire run of the exhibition, flying in every week from London to do so, in the hopes someone one would come in.

Directly before the opening a reading/performance event took place on the Landwehrkanal in the Tiergarten, Berlin. Artist, writer and curator Ian White (1971-2013) read Rosa Luxemburg’s text ‘The Proletarian Woman’ 1914. The gathering took place under a bridge near the memorial where the communist’s body was dumped in the canal after being brutally murdered by Freikorps paramilitaries. ( “...For the propertied bourgeois woman her house is the world. For the proletarian woman the whole world is her house, the world with its sorrow and its joy, with its cold cruelty and its brutal size...”) After the reading Carpenter tossed his playing cards into the canal as a “performance”.

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THE SHOW WAS ACCOMPANIED BY A SET OF COMPLIMENTARY PLAYING CARDS ---

---THERE WAS ALSO A PERFORMANCE; IAN WHITE READ A ROSA LUXEMBURG TEXT AND THE CARDS WERE THROWN IN THE CANAL