Jakob Ganslmeier & Ana Zibelnik
Bereitschaft, 2025
Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, +MSUM
Exhibition opening andartist talk: Wednesday, December 2025 at 6 p.m.
Duration of the exhibition: 3 December 2025 – 29 March 2026
Exhibition curator: Ana Mizerit
In the history of art, bodies have often had connotations going beyond their physical presence – they were symbols of power, ideals, discipline, and also tools of ideological address. Jakob Ganslmeier and Ana Zibelnik’s Bereitschaft (which is German for readiness or willingness) is a contemporary intervention in this long tradition, intertwining the history of totalitarian aesthetics and the present-day visual culture of social media.
The original Bereitschaft, a 1939 sculpture by Arno Breker, was created at a time when works of art were suffused with the ideology of Nazi Germany. Breker’s warrior embodied physical perfection, discipline, and readiness/willingness – values that Nazi propaganda associated with the vision of a strong nation. Today, the statue has seen an unexpected renaissance on platforms like TikTok, not as a historical artifact, but as a visual frame of reference for the looksmaxxing, mewing, and other trends that promise the attainment of idealized masculine beauty. This ideal is rooted in external appearance and promoting self-discipline in the gym as a condition of true masculinity, coupled with misogyny, physical stereotypes and extreme practices, such as “bone breaking,” which entails fracturing the lower jaw so that it becomes squarer, or resorting to plastic surgery to achieve “hunter eyes” with heavy eyebrows and hooded lids. Meanwhile, expressions such as brohood, gym bros, and bromance create a feeling of unity, subjugating the individual. Through such trend, influencers promote order and discipline, calling on their followers not to listen to their inner “bitch voice,” which ostensibly leads them to weakness.
Ganslmeier and Zibelnik translate the phenomenon of these proclivities reflecting fascist tendencies and serving as symptoms of the right-wing ideological shift into a monumental video sculpture that functions as an intersection between an artwork, an advertising billboard, and a smartphone screen. It is a blend of images of influencers, footage from fitness studios, fragments of Breker’s aesthetic, and contemporary internet subculture.
Their work traces how the visual aesthetics of power evolves over time and through the media. In Nazi art, idealized bodies could be read as propaganda tools; in the contemporary social media landscape, similar physical ideals are often presented in seemingly apolitical contexts – of fitness motivation, self-help, or “lifestyle” advice. But, as researchers of radicalization warn, such images can be entry points into extremist ideologies spreading online in subtle ways – through aesthetics rather than direct political appeal. TikTok and similar platforms do not act as passive transmitters of content, but as active curators, their algorithms engendering the repetition and reinforcement of certain images. The Bereitschaft aesthetic has thus become a self-replicating visual meme online, reproduced and repurposed by users often unaware of its historical weight. Ganslmeier and Zibelnik’s work is not just about one statue or trend – it is about a whole visual ecosystem that allows ideas from the past to infiltrate contemporary culture. It is a study of the visual continuity of ideology, a reminder that aesthetics is never neutral, and a call to read images critically – especially those that algorithms present as “beautiful.”
At a time when history is increasingly merging with memes, and when aesthetic preferences are entwined with political narratives, Bereitschaft acts as a mirror: it shows how thin the line between inspiration and instrumentalization really is.
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Ana Zibelnik (1995, Ljubljana) and Jakob Ganslmeier (1990, Munich) are an artist duo who collaborate on photography and video projects that center around youth identity formation and the influence extreme ideologies have on them. They are interested in how the visual arts can counter radical political stories and increase awareness of social issues.
Zibelnik holds a master’s degree in Film and Photographic Studies from the University of Leiden, while Ganslmeier obtained his master’s degree in Photography & Society from the Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten (The Hague). Their works, including Fault Line (2023, ongoing), Bereitschaft (2024), and Redpilled (2023), delve into societal issues such as climate anxiety, online trends, and the influence of extreme ideologies on young people. Their works have been exhibited at FOAM Museum Amsterdam, Fotomuseum Den Haag, Brandenburg Museum of Modern Art and other venues.
This exhibition is part of the Draught series of exhibitions presenting young artists and fresh ideas.
