Violence is cruel, in every form. Mental and physical violence damage our integrity, our existence. Bodies collide, crash into one another, burst, explode; bodies are shot at, injured, slit open, shot down, raped, mutilated; bodies are executed, hanged, beheaded, poisoned, extinguished by means of electric jolts. The body no longer steps outside, exposes itself, marries, conquers its world; rather it experiences a hefty thrust reversal. Physical, mental and emotional forms of violence attack people’s integrity, injure them, annihilate the spiritual and material body system. Images of domestic violence, of murders, of belligerent attacks, bomb explosions, executions, mass exterminations, of ethnic hatred and of structural, social violence, of state power pervade our life – and our visual life.
Violence seems to need images; violence seems to feed our visual fantasies. However, here is an equally valid point: Violence attracts images. The visual world of the West is full of depictions of violence: of wild, vagabonding violence and equally of belligerent violence, of ordering, state violence. And: Images attract violence themselves. Strength, power, violence springs from images. They intend not only to represent, but to show, to be present, monstrative. “Every image is a monstrance. The image is monstrous”,1 writes Jean-Luc Nancy in his essay “Image and Violence”, and adds: “The image is the wondrous graphic force of an improbable presence that arose from a non-constructible unrest. This graphic force belongs to the unit, without which there would be no thing, no presence, no subject. Nevertheless the unit of the thing, of the presence and of the subject is itself violent.”
Ten artists deal with the theme of “Violence and Destruction”. Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin combine an ancient script, the Bible, with photographs of different violent deeds from our time, from the time of photography. In a type of re-enactment they follow Bertolt Brecht, who used a bible as a journal, as a diary, and place photographs from the “Archive of Modern Conflict” (AMC) opposite various points of biblical text that mention violence: Divine Violence.
Suzanne Otten shows large, heavy heads of male and female soldiers who served in the US Army in Afghanistan. Tilted to the side, laid down, shifted from the upright middle, as signs of fragility, as symbols of the fact that many of the returnees, however long they were exposed to the daily horror, will never manage the road back to normality. Too great are the traumas that they experience in war.
Edmund Clark photographed in Guantánamo, in that lawless space which the American government, hypocritically, created outside its territory. Lawless, brutal, but strictly regulated. As precisely and coolly as the voice in Clark’s video reads out the Guantánamo prison rules, so strict are the rules for prisoners, and so strict was the censorship for the images. Every image that we see here has undergone thorough censorship, just like all letters that leave or arrive at the place. “In the prison camp, it was much more prescriptive and restrictive. You were escorted everywhere and before you went you had to agree not to photograph certain things […] you weren’t allowed to photograph the sky and the sea in the same image.” (Edmund Clark)
Boris Mikhailov stands with his camera in the middle of the Maidan in Kiev, the scene of the demonstrations against President Viktor Yanukovych at which around 100 people were shot. His images are impressively reminiscent of both history paintings of the 19th century and photographs of the Paris Commune, which lasted two months from March until May 1871. Like flags of resistance, his big scraps of paper hang from the wall and visualize the force of the movement on Independence Square.
Thomas Hirschhorn's images are “hard to take”; he does not spare us beholders when he interlaces, indeed marries, images of the beautiful veneer, of fashion and models, with images of extremely mutilated bodies. As though the flip side of society were stepping out of the model’s shadow, as though the pit were opening into the underworld of horror. Thomas Hirschhorn writes in his essay, “Why it is important – today – to show and look at images of destroyed human bodies”: “We do not want to accept the redundancy of such images because we do not want to accept the redundancy of cruelty against the person. That is the reason why it is important to show and images of destroyed human bodies – today – in their redundancy and to look at them.”
Keren Cytter’s 3-channel video Cross. Flowers. Rolex (2009) recreates the story of three eerie situations which took place, according to the Internet, in 2009: A woman lives on, even though she was shot in the head. A man jumps twice out of a fifth-floor window and survives. Another man is murdered with eleven stabs in five seconds. In these visible re-enactments Cytter “is not interested in rendering the real events. Rather, these films are to be understood as allegories of human emotional states, as further facets of Keren Cytter's continuing psychological study about our daily dramas and social disintegration.”
Julika Rudelius thematizes in the single-channel video Dressage the flaring of the strength of a group of ten-year-old girls against the prescribed path, a flaring which completely ebbs, fizzles out, once the girls have forced their way free. In the two-channel video Liaison she plays seductively with couples: Woman and man, weapons and sex, power and beauty.
Jules Spinatsch and Jürgen Teller form, unintentionally, an odd couple. Spinatsch opens this exhibition with a panoptic night image in the youth penal institution in Mannheim. Jürgen Teller brings up the rear with a disdainfully banal look at the slowly rotting Hitler chancellery in Nuremberg. Places of societal power.