Church of Now

“I got into something. At first I didn't really care if anyone could explain what it is all about. Especially in the details. The search for explanations only came when more and more people asked me for explanations. And I only explained to keep friends, family and eventually even complete strangers away from me and the others. Now I'm realizing that myself I'm getting further and further away from an explanation. I can't get out of it!"

The Church of Now (motto: Here and now!) is an attempt to institutionalize a space-time cult whose terminology is fed by a radically pragmatic orientation towards the Denkräume of various individual and collective nows. Contrary to possible assignments to hedonistic practices or categorization as a death cult, the imaginative horizons of the Church of Now are on the contrary shaped more by liberation fantasies, fragmentary word-image linkages, impatience and complex contradictions. There are numerous mutual influences between the ideas of the Church of Now, pop culture phenomena and pseudo-scientific explanatory models.

In the exhibition “Church of Now” at MAGAZIN, lay shamans, for the first time and without curatorial contextualization nor commenting, show time-based and spatialized rituals of this irritating community.

c/o now is Andrijana Ivanda, Duy An Tran, Ksenija Zdešar, Markus Rampl, Tobias Hönig and Paul Reinhardt. c/o now is a Berlin-based architectural practice engaged in imagining and realizing objects, architectures, and urbanity, as well as revising related issues in discourse and research. c/o now holds professorships at the University of Siegen and the Art University of Linz. c/o now's experimental "Anti-Landhaus" (Alexander Stumm) "Where the Wild Morels Grow..." was shortlisted for the Architecture Prize of the German Architecture Museum DAM and awarded the Bauwelt Prize 2023.