Medals are designed to make achievement visible. Earned, awarded, and more or less fixed in meaning, they condense ideas of achievement, honour, and recognition into a single, legible shorthand — a shiny, metallic object that stands proud and adorns a shelf or mantlepiece. While they don’t do anything, they send a clear message to everyone who sees them: I won. I was the best. I am valuable.
At Laura Mars Gallery in Berlin Schöneberg, I encountered a series of sculptures by Joshua Zielinski that unpack this logic quite literally: medals that have been dismantled and reassembled. Ribbons have been detached, metals recombined, and earnest stone bases swapped like musical chairs. What emerges is a series of “medals” that no longer behave like themselves. They retain the visual language of celebratory authority but simultaneously undermine its coherence, resulting in an uncanny artefact of fascination.
When I walked into the gallery, the first thing I saw was the sculptures and the second thing I saw were the people. I started recognising people right away and didn’t know why. Besides the regular scenester familiarity, I felt I knew these people intimately, but couldn’t quite figure out why.
As it turns out, I studied with many them over a decade ago at art school and had partially blocked them, as well as the whole experience, from memory — just enough to forget names, but not enough to erase faces.
For some context, graduating from the Kunsthochschule Weißensee with a Diplom in Bildhauerei was a relatively painful and strangely traumatic revelation for me, because it meant that I had trained to be a sculptor, and was now expected to be one. Making the decision, post-graduation, to actually work as an artist is a terrifying and brave decision which I invariably chose not to do. Instead, my path veered elsewhere, and almost fifteen years later, here I am. My sculptures are few and far between, and they most certainly do not butter my bread.
Zielinski, by contrast, pushed through that phase and into a sustained artistic practice that continues to accumulate exhibitions, residencies, grants, and teaching positions across Berlin and beyond. It is from within that contrast — between continuity and deviation, between institutional reinforcement and professional drift — that the work began to hit me deeply beyond its material form.
Medals are only one expression of a much wider system through which people are evaluated and recognised. Grades, job titles, promotions, awards — and, in the art context, the recognition of professional artists through exhibitions, residencies, teaching positions — all form what we can include under the umbrella of institutional visibility. Success. A language of validation. The dismantling of said validation inevitably resonates with the structures that shape careers, exposing how these systems are, like the medals, assembled through a series of components. The value they produce remains, for the majority, unstable, contingent, and open to reconfiguration.
A medal is, in many ways, one of the least resourceful and most superfluous forms of recognition. Unlike money or access, it offers little material consequence — a micro monument to pride that circulates symbolically rather than practically. Melt it down, and the value it yields would likely be negligible.
From this point, the implications extend outward quite quickly. If a medal can be seen for what it really is and reimagined, then what it once stood for — “first” place, excellence, deservingness — can be too. This is both unsettling and encouraging because once the symbolic weight begins to slip, the structures it upheld no longer feel secure. The house of cards comes crashing down and any clarity once promised by the systems begins to disintegrate and loosen, opening up a space for success to appear less absolute and more relative to how it is framed and assembled.
Recognition is already experienced by most people differently — and sometimes arbitrarily. Many opportunities that award glory are not lucrative, and vs. versa. Why one person wins the grant and not the other is rarely apparent. Why there are so many talented artists without recognition is equally baffling.
Zielinski’s recomposed objects mirror these lived experience more closely, in fact, than the originals ever could. These altered accolades do not answer the uncertainties so much as give them a form, a face, and uncover something that is usually sensed but not articulated.
Rather than presenting a single, coherent narrative of achievement, they are built from fragments. Their pieces carry different weights, provenances, and associations. In that way they resemble how identities are actually formed: across time, through accumulation, revision, and overlap, and not through a single decisive moment of recognition.
Still, the medals retain a certain visual authority that is composed and convincing. They still appear official enough. That points to something more structural: the extent to which systems manage to maintain their power and continue to feel legitimate even when everyone knows better, even though their coherence has been quite clearly and publicly destabilised. It was at this point that something began to register all the more more personally for me — the Millenial problem.
Millenials have a particularly sordid relationship to value and recognition. We came of age inside a system that still promised clear reward structures — degrees to land jobs, jobs to buy houses, and that sweet, sweet stability. But my generation experienced those systems becoming increasingly unstable beneath our feet within the prime of our development. As a result, the pendulum has swung the other way for us, and there is now a widespread and inbred scepticism toward fixed markers of success. Actually displaying a medal in your grownup Millenial home would probably be quite cringey to say the least.
Breaking down and reassembling medals echoes the fact that we just aren’t buying it anymore. Recognition has to be questioned — not out of cynicism, but out of necessity. Keep your medals, we want mobility. Whatever it takes, yes — but not without recognising the gap between symbolic reward and lived reality.
We are a generation intimately familiar with side hustles and non-linear identities, assembling lives across multiple roles, incomes, and forms of self-definition. Careers, especially “creative” ones, are rarely singular or continuous; they move across industries, disciplines, and shifting forms of self-definition. In my own experience, I find myself omitting parts of my practice from CVs, because including everything would only make me look like a directionless dabbler: a dispersion of attempts in too many directions and without enough legible consolidation or real “success”.
After all, medals are more often tied to leisure than to livelihood — markers of hobbyist achievement rather than structures that sustain a career. The gap between symbolic reward and lived reality has simply become too visible to ignore.
While, yes, there still do exist those unicorns who happen to land the right internship or the right apprenticeship straight out of university and move seamlessly into stable careers, these paths are not accessible. There are not enough prestigious internships to go around, and they often depend onf forms of background privilege that remain unevenly distributed.
For most, things unfold differently. Trajectories are cumulative rather than linear, shaped by detours, overlaps, and necessary improvisations. Perhaps it is precisely this mode of navigation that deserves greater recognition: a shift away from “one path, one reward” toward something more complex, unsettled, and grounded in reality. The reassembled medal — fragmented, layered, composed of multiple parts — feels closer to that lived reality than a single, clean symbol of achievement.
Finally, there is a generational tendency toward critical engagement rather than total rejection. Instead of opting out, many millennial practices involve working within existing structures in order to reshape them — repurposing, recontextualising, and hacking systems from the inside. This often takes the form of quiet irony: participating in the very systems one is sceptical of, while intentionally redirecting their logic. The sculptures fit that logic precisely: they do not discard the language of recognition, they rewrite it.
In this way, Zielinski’s gesture does more than deconstruct a symbol; it sharpens our awareness of how recognition is built, circulated, and sustained. The work holds open a space where accolades can be seen as elastic arrangements capable of change.
Not for the disappearance of recognition, but its liberation: an afterlife where honour endures, but detached from its original conditions of legitimacy. It is in that shift that the work finds its strength — and where it quietly invites the viewer to turn the question back on themselves: which of my own achievements still hold their shape, and which might already be waiting to be reassembled?
Joshua Zielinski: Parallelen sind nie daneben
Laura Mars Gallery
Bülowstraße 52, 10783 Berlin
more info here
artist website here
