Video Still showing a green, mountainous landscape of Vietnam with blue sky from which a hit military plane is falling. David Claerbout, Sammlung Goetz Munich

Sammlung Goetz at Haus der Kunst

Aschemünder

April 10 – September 4, 2011

The Aschemünder exhibition marked the start of a collaboration between the Sammlung Goetz and Haus der Kunst. Until 2020, a twice-yearly changing selection of film and media art from the Sammlung Goetz had been shown in 13 cabinet-style rooms in the basement air-raid shelter of Haus der Kunst. The first exhibition, Aschemünder, explored a theme that echoes the original purpose of the rooms themselves. The selected films address wartime experiences and the effects of war from the viewpoint of individual civilian survivors as well as from a military point of view.

With Hans Op de Beeck, David Claerbout, Willie Doherty, Juan Manuel Echavarría, Harun Farocki, Omer Fast, Mona Hatoum, Sven Johne, William Kentridge, Tracey Moffatt, Óscar Muñoz, Marcel Odenbach, Anri Sala, Sam Taylor-Wood and Zhou Hongxiang.

The works selected are not clearly divided into films about perpetrators on the one hand and victims on the other. Several of the films show survivors whose faces are marked by their experiences or deeds, as in Juan Manuel Echavarría’s Bocas de Ceniza, in which the protagonists relate their memories of a Colombian massacre in recitative chants that they have composed themselves. In Anri Sala’s Nocturnes, a former sniper spends his nights playing war games on a PlayStation – unable to sleep because he constantly sees the face of his first victim in his mind’s eye. In Marcel Odenbach’s In stillen Teichen lauern Krokodile, Rwandan villagers try to rebuild their lives as farmers in the wake of the genocide committed against the Tutsi by the Hutu.
In the films by Mona Hatoum and Tracey Moffatt, war and displacement form the traumatic background of everyday family life. Both films have autobiographical elements, with the bond between mother and child playing a central role. The works by William Kentridge, David Claerbout and Hans Op de Beeck focus on the destructive impact of war on the environment. Óscar Muñoz and Sam Taylor-Wood, in their works Biografías and Still Life, respectively, create a memento mori; a reminder of the universal transience of life.

Aschemünder.
Sammlung Goetz im Haus der Kunst

117 pages, 297 ill., softcover
German/English
2011, Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern
ISBN 978-3-7757-2974-1
€ 10,00

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feat. Mike Brodie, Mouse Green, Rhyw, Mia Justice Smith, Moritz Stumm

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[Translate to English:] Jeff Wall

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