Jason Hirata, Vergeltung, at Kaiserwache, Freiburg

Vergeltung by Jason Hirata, curated by Ilja Zaharov, at Kaiserwache, Freiburg, 22/10/2025 – 30/11/2025.

What does it mean to receive something simply for being present?
Not for applauding, understanding, purchasing, or even attentively observing, but merely for showing up. Entering Vergeltung by Jason Hirata at Kaiserwache in Freiburg feels like crossing into a parallel economy, one where payment isn’t tied to a product, but to attention, and the form of the artwork owes itself to the figure of the viewer. “We pay you,” announces Hirata, and it’s more than a symbolic gesture: it’s compensation, a quiet rebellion against the mechanisms of value in art. And as we read it, the word “Vergeltung,” retaliation, lodges itself in our minds like a pendulum just beginning to swing.

The space at Kaiserwache, usually austere, hums with a quiet, almost domestic energy. Nothing demands our gaze, everything seems arranged with the intent to disappear. Two wooden structures welcome visitors like modest second-hand furniture, these are the Accumulators, shelves that don’t assert themselves, but wait. They are works that seem to ask to be ignored, or at least allowed to exist on the margins of one’s gaze. Around them, a few other elements: a recipe for frijoles refritos printed on a business card, a gift, a gesture of care, a trace of home, and a wall decoration explicitly labeled “not an artwork,” as if trying to escape the grip of artistic categorization.

But the core of this exhibition isn’t made of objects, it’s a gesture, a transaction. Each visitor receives a payment, along with a receipt explaining why: “in exchange for your attention.” Curated by Ilja Zaharov, the scene takes on the feel of an administrative performance. The receipts, archived, numbered, logged, are part of the work. Art becomes bureaucratic performance, a system that makes visible the hidden economies of aesthetic experience. It is the audience, not the artist, who generates value. And they are paid for it.

On a material level, the works are stripped to their essentials: raw wood, printed paper, a frame, a nail in the wall. But this apparent austerity generates a fertile tension. The Accumulators don’t claim meaning, they fill up slowly, like dormant hives waiting to swarm. One of the two once held the materials Zaharov collected after every exhibition he visited, transforming the shelf into a diary, a tangible echo of other artworks, other rooms. The recipe, meanwhile, exists in two forms: a takeaway object, and a framed version that mimics museum display. In this way, the kitchen enters the white cube, along with the slow time of cooking, nourishing, and sharing.

Curiously, the so-called “decoration,” explicitly not an artwork, might be the exhibition’s most enigmatic element. Why call something non-art, when it’s precisely in that margin that the quietest forms of labor reside? Hirata plays with the grammar of art, its titles, its authorial gestures, its systems of visibility. In doing so, the exhibition not only assigns value to the viewer, but strips aura from the producer.

In the end, as we step out holding our receipt and the small card with the recipe, the image of the scale evoked by the title returns to us: not a static balance, but a swaying one, like the shifting relationship between artist and spectator. In Vergeltung, Hirata gives us something art rarely offers: not an object, but recognition. A payment. A thank you.

All that remains is to go and collect it.