The Lived Necrologue
An installation about memory, play, and transformation.
Originally created for the 7th Athens Biennale, “The Lived Necrologue” has transformed into something entirely new for this presentation. The installation sees itself as a living document of artistic memory: past and obsolete elements overlap with urgent and present ones, like archaeological layers of collective consciousness. At its core are two intuitive game boards by OMSK Social Club, developed with Jonas Schoeneberg’s own tarot set. Cards like The Hedonic Eye or The Avatar provide access to the practice of “Real Game Play,” where viewers not only observe but actively participate in the creation of narratives. Each choice creates new possibilities and closes off others, giving rise to interstitial spaces, ambivalent threats, and transformative moments. Schoeneberg’s “informational paintings” interweave historical references, personal symbolism, and materials charged with energy – from moonlight pigments to mineral signatures. His cards connect to the Marseille Tarot tradition, while also opening individual paths of interpretation.
The soundscape, designed by Happy New Tears, moves between euphoria and sorrow, wakefulness and dream, carried by experiences of an in-between state. Thus, “sonic protagonists” become audible, emotionally charging the space. The work unfolds as a social sculpture and social painting, where image, play, and body merge. “The Lived Necrologue” raises the question of how agency becomes tangible in artistic, spiritual, and social systems, and opens spaces where instability itself becomes an invitation to create new meanings.
OMSK Social Club is a curated and expansive collective whose artistic practice emerges between two lived worlds: one we know, and one of role-play. These worlds merge and open up a space of inquiry that takes the form of a specific immersive methodology they coined in 2017: Real Game Play – collective immersion and speculative world-building. From these live iterations, media relics such as films, scripts, and large-scale installations are derived, evoking states and transitions that could be either fiction or a reality not yet lived.
OMSK Social Club works closely with networks of audiences; everything is unique and unscripted. The living installations they create explore virtual egos, popular experiences, and cautionary narratives, transforming the works into a dematerialized hybrid of contemporary culture and the unique personal experiences of the participants. In the past, OMSK Social Club’s immersive Real Game Play environments have explored landscapes and themes such as memetic visual architectures, cryptoraves, desire&sacrifice, asemic hypertools, micro-networked affinity groups, DAOs, and consensus rituals.
They have exhibited across Europe, in institutions, galleries, theaters, and off-spaces such as the Martin Gropius Bau, the House of Electronic Arts Basel, HKW Berlin, MUDAM Luxembourg, La Casa Encendida Madrid, and Light Art Space Berlin. They were featured at the CTM Festival (2021), the 34th Ljubljana Biennale (2021), the 6th Athens Biennale (2018), the Transmediale Festival (2019), The Influencers (2018), and the Impakt Festival (2018). In 2021, they co-curated the 7th Athens Biennale with Larry Ossei-Mensah.