German Pavilion Venice: There hasn’t been this much pathos here since Anne Imhof

2024-04-18 14:31:51

Culture Art Biennale in Venice

There hasn’t been this much pathos here since Anne Imhof

As of: 4:31 p.m. | Reading time: 5 minutes

Installation „Farewell“ von Yael Bartana

Those: Yael Bartana/Andrea Rosetti

You can listen to our WELT podcasts here

In order to display embedded content, your revocable consent to the transmission and processing of personal data is necessary, as the providers of the embedded content require this consent as third party providers [In diesem Zusammenhang können auch Nutzungsprofile (u.a. auf Basis von Cookie-IDs) gebildet und angereichert werden, auch außerhalb des EWR]. By setting the switch to “on”, you agree to this (revocable at any time). This also includes your consent to the transfer of certain personal data to third countries, including the USA, in accordance with Art. 49 (1) (a) GDPR. You can find more information about this. You can revoke your consent at any time using the switch and privacy at the bottom of the page.

Great expectations were attached to the collaboration between an Israeli artist and a German theater man with Turkish roots in the German Pavilion in Venice. Yael Bartana’s and Ersan Mondtag’s ideas are surprising – one of them even gets the house talking.

It’s not easy for him either, the German Pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale. Hans Haacke tore up the marble floor in 1993, and at the last Biennale in 2022, Maria Eichhorn’s Nazi building was to be completely demolished and then transported away by ship. It remained a matter of exposing the foundations. This year the German Pavilion now looks as if a huge mole had burrowed its way under the Giardini and then crawled out in front of the Padiglione Germania.

Loose soil forms an untidy cone on the steps to the portal. This is usually where the entrance is, but theater director Ersan Mondtag and Israeli artist Yael Bartana moved it to the side of the building. Both represent Germany at the Biennale, both live in Berlin. They were invited by the curator Çağla Ilk. Other artists selected by Ilk perform sound installations on an uninhabited island in the lagoon, but what matters most at the Venice Biennale is this house in its spatial limitations, its force, its abysses and possibilities.

also read

Since Anne Imhof in 2017, no one has offered as much pathos as Mondtag and Bartana, and back then “Faust” won the Golden Lion. The German contribution has a chance this time too. Entering is like traveling back in time – to the 1970s, when coal dust covered the scratched plaster on German house facades with a mud-colored veil. Dust also wafts through the pavilion, you can feel it on your teeth, it crunches on the old herringbone parquet that comes from a GDR cultural club in Brandenburg. Ersan Mondtag turned the inside into the outside and built a building inside the pavilion. There is a two-story house in the middle of the main hall. The entrance will probably be the hardest threshold of the entire Venice Biennale to overcome, simply because so few viewers can fit into these rooms at the same time.

The “Monument of an Unknown Person” has to do with Ersan Mondtag’s origins. His grandfather came to Germany from Anatolia in 1968 and found a job at the West Berlin company Eternit. In a modest interior covered in dust, we find documents and objects from the estate of Hasan Aygün, who died of cancer before his retirement – Eternit manufactured asbestos. We wander through a kitchen, a modest living room, a bedroom with an Ataturk portrait – it is a dusty ghost house and a monument to the immigration society that was not allowed to exist for a long time. The excavation in front of the pavilion, it now becomes clear, is intended to represent Anatolian soil: native soil. But the dust everywhere evokes other associations. Hasan Aygün worked as a machine operator at Eternit for decades and was exposed to asbestos. One’s own health was sacrificed to build a life for one’s family. Aygün’s grandson is now a star in the German cultural scene under a stage name. This is touching and not at all cheesy.

Yael Bartana, who has lived in Germany for 15 years, is currently dealing with the distant future of migration in her video works and installations: humanity has to leave the earth after an ecological catastrophe and embarks on spaceships. It is generation ships that transport entire peoples to a new world. Inspired by Jewish mystical teachings of Kabbalah, she lets the spaceship “become a medium of salvation,” as the accompanying text says. On board the ships, the survivors perform strange rituals in artificial forests.

also read

It is a galactic vision that is being laid out. But like any work of art, “Light to the Nations” is knee-deep in its own material reality. Unfortunately, the world saver spaceship looks like it was rendered on a Windows PC around 2012. His gliding through space looks like the scenes that are cut between sequences with real action in Star Trek. It’s more the concept itself that is a topic of conversation – you can easily retell the article, the approach is also latently politically explosive, but the work itself is not. With Ersan Mondtag it’s the other way around: his idea for the set design is quickly understood, but what actually happens in this house is far less easy to put together into a narrative. Actors perform in the dust house and do strange things – get out of a sheet naked and then run down the stairs, for example, or eat dust soup together. These are open moments that don’t exhaust themselves so quickly.

“Monument of an Unknown Man” by Ersan Mondtag

Source: Ersan Mondtag/Thomas Aurin

Ersan Mondtag is not a visual artist, but with his participation in the Biennale he inevitably moves into the field of suggestive hyperrealism, which is also used by Gregor Schneider (Golden Lion 2001), the Pole Robert Kusmirowski and the Swiss Christoph Büchel (the latter opens in Venice). days a solo show at Fondazione Prada). In their productions, everything is right down to the last detail, and yet of course everything is completely different.

Here you will find content from third parties

In order to display embedded content, your revocable consent to the transmission and processing of personal data is necessary, as the providers of the embedded content require this consent as third party providers [In diesem Zusammenhang können auch Nutzungsprofile (u.a. auf Basis von Cookie-IDs) gebildet und angereichert werden, auch außerhalb des EWR]. By setting the switch to “on”, you agree to this (revocable at any time). This also includes your consent to the transfer of certain personal data to third countries, including the USA, in accordance with Art. 49 (1) (a) GDPR. You can find more information about this. You can revoke your consent at any time using the switch and privacy at the bottom of the page.

Where Gregor Schneider shifts the arrangement of his rooms into a nightmare and Kusmirowski recreates historical objects, Mondtag uses real props. In this way, he is potentially moving on the borderline of scenery-pushing, of mere set design.

But the architectural intervention in the house really makes it speak for itself – from the roof of the scratch cleaning hut you can finally see straight ahead through the high rear windows of the pavilion out to the lagoon. Inside and outside meet at the threshold, and that is the concept of the pavilion – the title “Threshold” means nothing other than threshold space.

The German contribution is strikingly different than what Great Britain and France are doing with their thresholds. Both Julien Creuzet and John Akomfrah installed screens on the facade, and Akomfrah also moved the entrance, but the staging inside remains surprisingly conventional. The German contribution does not have to shy away from comparison with the competition this year.