Concept

-2009-

Nicholas Logsdail, owner of Lisson Gallery, sometimes invites artists to spend time on the Kenyan island of Lamu. There, in a former coconut oil factory, he operates an art space with facilities for working, living, and exhibiting. The factory complex has thus been turned into an artist resort.
During his visit, Jankowski deciding to take up an old tradition: the business of making oil. Together with the »artist-laborers« Shirazeh Houshiary, Marina Abramović, Jorinde Voigt, and Wael Shawky, he produced a bottle of extremely rare coconut oil through an elaborate procedure. They created a collective art product, an extract of the work of five different artists, each of whom gave up a bit of their creative energy and worked for Jankowski. The oil produced was bottled and given a label.
Jankowski also asked each of the participating artists about the essence of the work that they were hoping to accomplish on the island and filtered out one sentence from each interview: The essence of Marina Abramović‘s outlook, for example, was, »More and more of less and less!« Local signpainters, who normally paint advertisements on the exterior walls of houses, created wooden tablets, each of which carried one of the sentences. The sentences thus became advertising slogans for the coconut oil.

Glass bottle, coconut oil
5 billboards, oil on wood
Video installation; work in progress