Always Right

Swiss artist duo Gen Atem and Miriam Bossard channel impulses from urban art into cross-genre experiments. Gen Atem’s artistic roots lie in political graffiti, then hip hop, breakdance and DJing. Under the pseudonym “Genius”, he was among the first generation of European graffiti writers. Before long, he moved nearer the source of such movements, joining the legendary artist and guru Rammellzee in New York, who wove together elements of graffiti writing to forge his very own postmodernist personal mythology – “Tag Master Killer” and “Ikonoklast Panzerism” – and translate it into performance art. Miriam Bossard also landed in the Mecca for graffiti, where she first studied and worked as a curator before collaborating with Gen Atem as a co-artist. With Always Right, their graffiti performance for the Urban Art Biennale 2024, Gen Atem and Miriam Bossard have remained true to themselves and – not for the first time – returned to the roots: public art with a political payload. Using charcoal – an essential material in the iron industry – as a writing material and in collaboration with their fellow artist S213 as the third man, they have a created a memorial in the fraught field of competing ideologies.

Robert Kaltenhäuser