Christian Jankowski

Die Jagd (The Hunt)

Video, 1 min 11 sec, silent, 1992/1997

From April 29 to June 14, 2026, the Fonds cantonal d’art contemporain is pleased to host the Biennial of Urban Art and Nature (re)connecting.earth on the screens of the Mire program at the Chêne-Bourg and Eaux-Vives train stations!

Die Jagd (The Hunt) marks one of Christian Jankowski’s earliest performative works and forms part of a critical reflection on contemporary consumption patterns. For a week, the artist roams a supermarket armed with a bow and arrows, eating only the products he ‘hunts’ directly from the shelves. This absurd installation subverts the traditional codes of hunting and transposes them into an entirely artificial environment: that of mass retail. By re-enacting the hunter’s gestures within a standardised, sterile space, Jankowski creates a tension between two opposing realities: that of so-called ‘natural’ survival and that of industrial consumption. Food products, packaged, labelled and ready to eat, suddenly take on a violent and concrete dimension. Slaughtering a frozen chicken or piercing a block of butter amounts to symbolically reintroducing the act of killing, which is usually erased from our societies. The work thus questions our relationship with food, particularly meat, whose animal origin is often rendered invisible. It also highlights the absurdity of consumerist logic: despite the artist’s spectacular intervention, the system remains unchanged. At the checkout, the products are simply scanned, arrows still stuck in them, amid total indifference. This moment highlights the commercial system’s ability to absorb any form of deviation or criticism. Through this performance, Jankowski plays with the cliché of the ‘starving artist’ and subverts the codes of heroic survival.

Video presented as part of the 3rd (re)connecting.earth Biennial, organised by the art-werk association.