Every now and then, you will catch me actu­ally vis­it­ing an exhib­i­tion for more than just the canapés at the ver­n­is­sage. In fact, some­times I’ll gladly miss out on the open­ing to have the space to myself a couple of days later. This was exactly the case with the cur­rently ongo­ing Dash Snow exhib­i­tion at Con­tem­por­ary Fine Arts Gal­lery. That dude is crazy, pro­voc­at­ive and cer­tainly not just any bor­ing artist.

Dash Snow is some­what the blue­print of the rav­ing, party­ing hip­ster artist — except he’s the New York kind of hip­ster, with even more excess­ive, hedon­istic party­ing than Ber­lin ever seemed to have (well, to cla­rify on that: of course Ber­lin has a vast his­tory of party­ing. Bizar­rely though, Amer­ic­ans have their very own, destruct­ive seem­ing kind of party, where shoot­ing up H and puk­ing all over someone elses penis are deeply integ­rated. I’ll choose the pill pop­ping Techno rave and gentle orgies any­time over Snows fucked up world, but it’s a world non­ethe­less and worth check­ing out from afar). Any­way: Dash Snows polar­oids and the movie CFA has on dis­play are deeply dis­turb­ing, but also hil­ari­ous, inter­est­ing and very insightful.

For me, the col­lec­tion of Dash Snows polar­oids is more than just art in the primal sense. They doc­u­ment a whole era and some­how con­nect the viewer to a world that they’d never been part of. Hav­ing so many pic­tures of your own life, of your friends and of a cer­tain phase and then leav­ing it behind for the rest of the world to see is exactly what we’re doing right here, isn’t it (cer­tainly not as intim­ate as Snow did, but you can’t snap the sexy moments at Berg­hain so what’s the use!). Someday we’ll be able to look back and say: wow, remem­ber, in our twen­ties, we were wear­ing that, and we were doing this, and oh, remem­ber that pic­ture and that place? We’re doc­u­ment­ing our lives and the rapid changes in the city. I’m kind of look­ing for­ward to the future, where I’ll look back on the present now with a dif­fer­ent per­spect­ive. What will I think about the past and how will it feel to be so much older with so much proof of how it used to be?

Dash Snows works will be on dis­play til the 24^th of March at Con­tem­por­ary Fine Arts Gal­lery. Entrance is free.