Berlin – At first glance, you couldn’t have imagined a better constellation: the director Anta Helena Recke, who, in her iconoclasting stage installations of recent years, showed in a refreshing way how, even after 30 years of post-dramatic deconstruction in the theater, one can still dismantle unexamined patterns of thought and perception . And the author Olivia Wenzel, who in her novel “1000 Serpentinen Angst” last year lets a young black woman from East Germany’s search for identity float virtuously through space, dreams, time and clichés.
Both work particularly rich in images, concentrate on exact descriptions and yet first and foremost ask how images are actually created, how those on the retina compete with those in the memory and how gazes can become fearful weapons through conventions of belonging and alienation. Both black artists who grew up in Germany in the 1990s – Recke in Munich, Wenzel in Weimar – have had enough everyday experiences of racism, which is now incorporated into their highly reflective works. Both try to relentlessly self-critical and form-critical to track down the winding paths on which images of others and self-images mix in the minds to toxic projections. Projections that permeate all areas of society, including art.
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