ANGST.MACHT.RAUM. Teil 3: Press-Release

ANGST. MACHT. RAUM.  Teil III

With videoworks by Klaus vom Bruch, Niklas Goldbach and Korpys/Löffler
Curated by Viktor Neumann

ANGST. MACHT. RAUM. (“FEAR. POWER. SPACE.“) investigates procedures and strategies in the generation of fear through the economy of power, fueled in territorial, cultural or media spaces as the stage of in- or exclusion.

The third part of this series of exhibitions presented in the Senatsreservespeicher focuses on forms of media mechanisms of representation of those who hold political and economic power and depicts potential counterstrategies within artistic production.

ANGST. MACHT. RAUM. Part III presents videoworks which deal closely with the network of tightly interdependent relations between the elite within military, politics and economics:

Klaus vom Bruch´s Das Schleyerband I/II (1977/78) is a two-part video documentation which comprises primarily TV-Footage recorded in the period between September 1977 and June 1978. Responding to contemporaneity without mediation, the spare interventions within found footage and the partly recorded material in bold manner, it documents and debates the mediapraxis at the time of the “Deutscher Herbst”. The subtle adaptation of the material through cutting and manipulation at the same time attests the necessity of telling the history of this dramatic German era of terror and governmental counter-terror beyond the media´s established strategies of manipulation and through a disengagement of their structural correlations in a alternative, subjective manner.

Korpys/Löffler´s The Nuclear Football (2004) presents the footage of representational demeanour during the state visit of George W. Bush in May 2002, captured through the procedures of press accreditation: the orchestration of the arrival and leave-taking at the Berlin-Tegel airport and the visit at Schloss Bellevue become, however, merely the background story, the side-events of the logistics prearrangements of this meticulously planned and under strict discipline administrated ceremonial Act of State become the center of attention: the footage, filmed in elegiac tracking shots, presents images costumarily excluded from the standardized repertoire of official media images , foilt by Brian Eno´s Music for Airports and a mysterious, whispering voice, making the viewer an accomplice of the content of a certain briefcase.

Niklas Goldbachs TEN (2010) is an allegory of the intransparency of the power elite. The gathering of a group of ten men, taking decisions over fate and doom in ambiguous rituals, oscillates between dystopic fiction and a relentless survey: freed from emotions or distinctions, the Ten, all of them one and the same person, are trapped between elite representational behavior and lethargic activities. The view behind the scenes of a summit meeting on a stage of a sterile and de-individualized luxurious suite including the tableaus of Athens by night, anticipates a climax of a fragile system of power, ultimately trying to preserve itself through the performance of its own iconography and traditional allocation of roles.