THIS SPACE IS THE MOST unusual at the 2011 Venice Biennale. If you remain here for any length of time you will not leave it without being very moved. The German pavilion is full of emotion and confronts the visitor with messages. A central motif of the installation, in the main room of the pavilion, is the longing for salvation in the face of death. The installation is modelled on a Catholic church, yet it also speaks of the hopelessness of striving for infinity. It addresses the frailness of the body and celebrates the physical. It is about the presence of an artist who can only be experienced as a memory. Christoph Schlingensief was no longer able to design the German Pavilion himself. The actionist, allrounder, provocateur, filmmaker, theatre and opera director died of lung cancer in August 2010, not yet 50 years old. After his death, which came in the middle of his preparations for the Biennale, the person responsible for the German pavilion in Venice, Susanne Gaensheimer, Director of the Frankfurt Museum of Modern Art, upheld her choice of artist. For Gaensheimer, Christoph Schlingensief was a “genuinely critical, political, incorruptible mind”. So having given it some brief consideration, she decided to show Schlingensief in Venice without Schlingensief, and thus posthumously make known to a larger international audience a figure who like few other artists of his generation was also untiringly preoccupied with images and caricatures of Germany.
The German presentation for this exhibition of world art in the famous city with the lagoon is commissioned and co-financed in the framework of the Foreign Office’s Culture and Education Policy. This year’s contribution raises many questions and stirs up many emotions, while also being an artistic crossover project. And so impressed were the jury members by it all, that Germany received the Golden Lion for the Best National Pavilion. Traditionally prizes at the Biennale, which runs until the end of November, are presented at the beginning of the show, and it has been ten years since Germany last won that award. Then, Gregor Schneider had transformed the historically fraught pavilion building in Venice, reconstructed in the classicist style by the National Socialists, into a labyrinthine structure. The 2011 Venice Biennale offers 89 national contributions in the Giardini and in the Arsenale. The curator, Bice Curiger, selected 83 artists for the main exhibitions at these two venues, but numerous other shows are also taking place at various fringe venues. The German Pavilion is not the only one to offer art with a German reference: among the international Biennale artists there are about 20 who have made Berlin their creative basis, while German artist Thomas Killper is showing his – altogether controversial – “Pavilion for Revolutionary Free Speech” for Denmark.
A major attraction for all visitors, however, is the German Pavilion, where more existential issues are addressed than at any other place in this Biennale. Close associates of Schlingensief have designed the pavilion in his sense. Schlingensief’s widow Aino Laberenz was closely involved in the concept, which is based mainly on the last work he directed, Church of Fear vs. the Alien Within, premiered at the Ruhr Triennial in Duisburg in 2008. The main focus here is a film that conjures up a lot of pathos, ranging from Catholicism to Wagner’s Parsifal. This is repeatedly interrupted by items similar to those used by Joseph Beuys, and by constant references to the Fluxus movement, for which life itself was regarded as a work of art. What particularly moves the viewers is the radical candidness so typical of Schlingensief and with which he even spoke about his cancer and about the failure of all attempts to transcend illness and death through art and religion: ultimately the individual is thrown back on himself. The films that established Schlingensief’s reputation as a provocateur are being shown in an adjoining room; his project to set up a music theatre in a village in Africa is introduced in another room.
The idea of setting up a ceremonial hall in the village of Laongo near Burkina Faso‘s capital Ouagadougou is a quintessentially Schlingensief project: at first glance, somewhat unreal, at second glance full of depth and seriousness. Together with Francis Kéré, a prize-winning architect from Burkina Faso, Schlingensief laid the foundation stone for the hall in spring 2010. It is to be much more than a music hall and is intended to accommodate a school of film and music, residences, offices, a football pitch, agricultural areas and an infirmary. A whole Opera Village was to be set up in Laongo, and that is precisely what is happening, even after Schlingensief’s death. The project is being co-financed by many people and institutions, including the Foreign Office and the Goethe Institute. That Opera Village will remain as Christoph Schlingensief’s legacy.///
