Beyond cheap gestures is originated in the framework of the exhibition Out here in the wild oats amid the alien corn curated by Sean Mullan and Victoria Tarak which took place in the public space of the Lanz Park in Düsseldorf in 2021. The exhibition in the park continues the idea of an international sculpture park, which goes back to Alfred Schmela. In 1975, he opened the Galerie im Park and turned the garden into a sculpture park. After a long period in which the park was not used, the idea was revived in summer 2020.

As one of the participating artist of the 2021 edition, Anna Budniewski created a site-specific installation for the occasion of the exhibition that acted as a setting for her piece Briefe which deal with the daily work-life correspondences of the family Schmela who inhabited the villa on the Lanz park’s grounds in the late seventies. In the previous years, Anna Budniewski met the artist-duo Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda, who introduced her to their book Letters (2018), for that the two artist mined the archive of the Galerie Schmela, located in the Getty Research Institute and summarized and paraphrased parts of the family’s extensive gallery correspondence written between 1980 and 1992. The approach of Chung and Takeki Maeda served Anna Budniewski as the departure point to re-formulated the correspondence afresh, using literary and performative criteria. Throughout the duration of the exhibition, she wrote more than two hundred letters, which were sent daily to a mailbox installed at the entrance of the park. Further the letters were read out loud in public readings by the artist, alongside her sister, Eva Budniewski and her mother Christina Budniewski. With the piece Briefe Budniewski followed her interest in the relation of context, translation and mediation as well the tension between imagination, fiction, and reality. The project beyond cheap gestures will further investigate and deepen these interests and is taking place as a collaboration between the curator Victoria Tarak and the artist Anna Budniewski.