Jeudi 06 Novembre 2014 12:13:31 par actuphoto dans Expositions

In response to the prevailing mood of political exhaustion and great instability of the overall political climate in and around Europe, The Alien Within questions the future of Western society, in particular the endangerment of its structures by a conscious deployment and politicization of fear as a new norm.

Within such a scenario, many questions arise: Should art practices address inconvenient issues head-on, forcing us to take a position? Can they dominate our demons, exorcise our undesirable fears in good? Does fear form the basis for a 21st-century European cosmopolitanism able to confront the wish for government and ungovernable paranoia? Can a medium-sized Scandinavian city like Malmö epitomize this model, and be celebrated for it?

The Alien Within is an ambitious project realized in close cooperation with the Goethe-Institut. Nurtured by the multiculturalism of Malmö, it brings together a think tank around the eclectic multi-media installation Animatograph – Icelandic Edition. Destroy Thingvellir, 2005, by the late German theatre director, filmmaker, and visual artist Christoph Schlingensief (1960–2010). This is framed by documentation material presenting the genesis and development of this installation, related to a selection of his most political work.

The Animatograph is Schlingensief’s first presentation in an art institution in Scandinavia, and one of the rare installation works kept intact. Commissioned for the 2005 Reykjavík Arts Festival by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna, it is a large-scale revolving and walk-on stage combining building elements, props, and screens that attest to the artist´s extraordinary ability to undermine the traditional media of art, cinema, and theatre. It is a performance as well as a projection screen able to spatially draw spectators into filmic scenes, showing how reality encompasses fiction. Here viewers are flooded by a disorderly collection of overpowering images without a straightforward storyline; they expose civilizational struggles at a religious, political, historical, and personal level. European traditions and Nordic myths overlap with pagan spirits, legendary heroes, and African shamanistic customs: from the Icelandic and German epic poems Edda and Nibelungenlied [The Song of the Nibelungs] to Richard Wagner’s operas, via the origin of democratic parliamentarianism in Iceland and the barbarian rule in Lüderitz, Namibia, by German South-West Africa prior to 1915. As a “soul-writer” of 21st-century human nature and an “organ of vision,” the Animatograph records impressions of urban realities, rearranging and re-transmitting them in a chaotic cosmos that reflects the disparate contexts where it was shown. In a permanent altering state, its revolving stage symbolizes the indeterminate nature of social systems across the world.