Founded in 1993 by Ali Janka, Florian Reither, Tobias Urban, and Wolfgang Gantner, Gelitin allegedly first met in 1978 “when they all attended a summer camp.” They have been “playing and working together” ever since, entering their fourth decade of collaborative art making with the first ever exhibition of their work in Chicago. Known internationally for their ambitious public art projects and transgressive performances, Gelitin are indefatigable partisans of the ludic impulse in art, forever honoring Friedrich Schiller’s timeless claim that “man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays.”

Gelitin’s contribution to This is a Rehearsal, developed in close collaboration with the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago, is a major new interactive installation titled Democratic Sculpture 7 in an ongoing series of works that solicit activation through sharing. Democratic Sculpture 7 was conceived during their exhibition at the artist-run gallery O’Flaherty’s in New York in the spring of 2023. The sculpture, made primarily using second-hand items of clothing, does indeed look like a quintessential New York slice of pizza– thinner than Chicago’s deep dish variant on the classic Neapolitan staple that, for some years now, has featured on UNESCO’s ever-expanding list of “intangible cultural heritage.” Five holes in the sculpture allow the viewer to poke their head through the pizza’s colorful toppings, thereby turning the static object into a conversation piece. The sculpture is proverbial food for all manner of thought, from the aesthetic of the pie chart to the politics of food, such as the “food deserts” in some of Chicago’s poorer neighborhoods. Democratic Sculpture 7 will be traversing the city as part of the opening festivities of This is a Rehearsal.

Written by Dieter Roelstraete