Give Love Back Again – Pop-up presents a wide range of copies and adaptations, coming from various sources – from the fashion industry to independent projects and their many contexts of use, such as socks, T-shirts, tattoos, mugs, protest posters, or vending machines. Sandra Doeller collected many of these objects over the past ten years. Some were sent to her, others she discovered online or by chance in the streets of major cities.

A decade later, these numerous appropriations and modifications of the poster and the idea of love as a principle of reciprocity offer an opportunity to question the meaning and role of copyright in the context of creative achievements – especially in view of the increasing relevance of artificial intelligence in the relationship between original and copy.

In 2014/2015, Eva Linhart initiated Give Love Back to explore the scope and meaning of applied art. She chose Ata Macias as the project’s central figure, who is influential in Frankfurt’s cultural scene. He shaped spaces such as the Robert Johnson Club, the legendary concept store Bergman, Club Michel, and many other hotspots at the intersection of DJing, fashion, and lifestyle, in collaboration with artists such as Tobias Rehberger, Anne Imhof, Michael Riedel, and Carsten Fock. The exhibition addressed the relationship between art and life through Macias’ design strategies and social creativity.

As head of the Department of Book Art and Graphics, Eva Linhart invited her newly appointed colleague Mahret Kupka – curator for fashion, body, and performance – to collaborate. Together with Katharina Baumecker, they expanded the project through dialog with creative producer Gabi Schirrmacher and graphic designer Sandra Doeller. Ata Macias and his practice – situated between artistic strategy and everyday life – formed the focal point from which the project investigated the challenges of applied art.
The project proved highly successful: 2,500 people attended the opening on 12 September, 2014, and interest remained high thereafter. The exhibition’s success went beyond its theme and the affection for Ata. Although many people associated him with joyful experiences and expressed their appreciation by visiting the show, it was particularly the posters designed by Sandra Doeller – combining drawings by Graziano Capitta and a text by Matthias Wagner K – that became the exhibition’s ambassadors: Applied art, in the spirit of Give Love Back, made its way into the world.

This reflects a central issue: due to their widespread distribution, the posters developed a life of their own – beyond authorized contexts. While the numerous adaptations testify the iconic power of the design, they also demonstrate the fine line between inspiration, appropriation and copyright infringement. Beyond their creative success, the posters also draw attention to the unresolved issues of applied art.
However, rather than legally asserting their authorship, the graphic designer and the artist are responding to the independent evolution of the motifs in the spirit of Give Love Back – and in line with Coco Chanel’s famous quote: “If you want to be original, be prepared to be copied.”

6 pm
Opening: Director Professor Matthias Wagner K

6.20 pm
Slide show of the exhibition Give Love Back. Ata Macias and Partners. An Exhibition on the Question of What Applied Art Can Be Today (2014/15) with commentary by the team involved: Eva Linhart and Mahret Kupka, as well as Ata Macias, Sandra Doeller, and Gabi Schirrmacher.

6.50 pm
Presentation by Sandra Doeller: A Poster Travels the World
Showcasing Showcasing global imitations and plagiarisms of the Give Love Back exhibition posters.

7.10 pm
Panel discussion: Copyright Between Inspiration, Copy, and Plagiarism
With Sandra Doeller, graphic designer with experience at the intersection of design and authorship; Andreas Knauf, legal expert and specialist attorney for intellectual property law focusing on copyright, trademark, design, and competition law, advising creatives and companies in the creative industry; and Eva Linhart, art historian focused on the intersection of fine and applied arts, who engages critically with the terminology and notions of art used in copyright law.

Together, they explore the following questions: What is copyright? What does “threshold of originality” mean? Who decides such matters? And according to which criteria?

8 pm
End

Participants

Ata Macias combines concepts from visual art and club culture like no other. Covering the fields of interior design, fashion, food, music, art, or attitude, he and his collaborators create unique concepts, objects, and environments.

Sandra Doeller is a graphic designer working in poster, book, and exhibition design in the arts and culture sector. In 2013, she founded Bureau Sandra Doeller in Frankfurt am Main, pursuing a conceptual, context-based design approach. In additon to her design practice, she teaches regularly at art and design universities and is a co-founder of interdisciplinary platforms for reflecting on graphic design at the intersection with adjacent disciplines.

Gabi Schirrmacher is a creative producer with a focus on collaborative formats. For over 18 years, she has overseen art-in-architecture projects for international artists. During Give Love Back (2014/2015), she was involved in developing the concept store and described her role as “partnerizing,” involving conceptual planning, mediating between designers and producers, and accompanying the edition’s development.

Legal Expertise

Andreas Knauf has worked independently as a lawyer and specialist attorney for intellectual property law for over 20 years. His practice focuses on copyright, trademark, design, and competition law, fields in which he primarily advises creatives and creative industry companies.
Alongside his legal practice, he lectures at various universities on music law and design law. In doing so, he is frequently faced with questions about the threshold of originality and other core issues of intellectual property rights.

Museum Angewandte Kunst

Dr. Eva Linhart is an art historian specializing in the aesthetic boundaries, the intersection between fine and applied arts, as well as the concept of artistic genius as a form of bourgeois emancipation. Since 1999, she has been a research associate at the Museum Angewandte Kunst. In 2003 she was appointed head of the Department of Book Art and Graphics. She has curated numerous projects and exhibitions that explore the book as an art space and examining posters as agents operating between graphic, painterly, and performative strategies.

Dr. Mahret Kupka is an art historian, curator, and author focusing on fashion as a cultural practice. Her work addresses questions of representation, identity, and decolonization in design. Since 2013 she has been a curator at the Museum Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt while also teaching at institutions including UdK Berlin and the Städelschule.

Prof. Matthias Wagner K, Director of the Museum Angewandte Kunst, has headed the institution since 2012. His curatorial vision sees the museum as a space of possibility, a platform for negotiating the question of what applied art can be. With the dialogue-based exhibition Give Love Back exploring the relationship between art and life, his approach reached a first experimental and reflective milestone.