June 20 – July 26, 2009

Thomas Kilpper
State of Control

June 20–July 26, 2009
Opening: Friday, June 19
7 pm, former GDR Ministry for State Security (MfS),
Normannenstr. 19, 10365 Berlin-Lichtenberg

Speakers include: Marius Babias (director n.b.k.), Dr. Eugen Blume (director Hamburger Bahnhof)
from 10 pm Basso-Bar

6-9 pm, n.b.k., Chausseestraße 128/129, 10115 Berlin-Mitte

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein is realizing a project with artist Thomas Kilpper at the former GDR Ministry for State Security (MfS), which is being made accessible to the public for the first time. Additional works by the artist will be shown at the same time in the spaces at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein.

In his floor cuttings, Berlin artist Thomas Kilpper, born in Stuttgart, engages with German history. His large-scale intervention on 1,600 square meters offers a historical retrospective on various state concepts of surveillance and repression, from the Nazi period to the digital present.  The divided history of Germany that can be read in this building and in the cut motifs and imprints in the floor is also one of resistance against systems of injustice. In this work, Klipper chronicles the history of both German states and the events from 1989/90 until today.

Curated by Marius Babias

Book Series n.b.k. Exhibitions
As part of the book series n.b.k. Exhibitions, a catalog will be published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne, including a preface by Marius Babias and an interview with Clemens Krümmel, 144 pages with color illustrations, German/English.

Locations

Former GDR Ministry for State Security (MfS),
Normannenstr. 19, 10365 Berlin-Lichtenberg
(near Research Center and Memorial Site Normannenstraße, so-called Stasi-Museum)
Thursday – Sunday  11 am – 7pm

Neuer Berliner Kunstverein,
Chausseestraße 128/129, 10115 Berlin-Mitte
Tuesday – Sunday  12 am – 6 pm
Thursday 12 am – 8 pm

Program

Thursday, June 25, 2009, n.b.k. (Chausseestraße 128/129)
7 pm Artist talk with Thomas Kilpper (artist) and Marius Babias (curator)

Thursday, July 09, 2009, former MfS (Normannenstraße 19)
8 pm Concert Erste Stufe Haifisch (GER) / Victim (GB)

Thursday, July 16, 2009, former MfS (Normannenstraße 19)
5 pm Guided tour Research Center and Memorial Site Normannenstraße (so-called Stasi-Museum) and exhibiton walk together with Thomas Kilpper (artist) und Sophie Goltz (Communication / Education n.b.k.)

Saturday, July 18, 2009, n.b.k. (Chausseestraße 128/129)
8 pm Concert Arnold Dreyblatt Ensemble
Supported by

Supported by :

Galerie Christian Nagel (Berlin/Cologne)

Patrick Heide Contemporary Art (London)

More Exhibitions:

Thomas Kilpper – State of Control
June 22 – July 18, 2009
Thursday – Saturday 1-6 pm

Opening brunch
Sonday, June 21, 2009, 11 am
Galerie Olaf Stüber
Max-Beer-Str. 25 | D-10119 Berlin |
T +49 (0)30. 28 38 63-12
mail@galerieolafstueber.de | www.galerieolafstueber.de

September 11 – October 11, 2008

Disguise

@ Patrick Heide Contemporary, London September 11 – October 11, 2008.

The RAF (Royal Air Force) operation “window” marks the starting point for Thomas Kilpper’s new installation disguise. During WW2 British bombers dropped millions of aluminium strips to disguise themselves and deceive the German Luftwaffe and disturb their radio connections.
Wonderfully glimmering clouds of aluminium foil in the sky starkly contrasted the subsequent inferno in Dresden, Hamburg or Stuttgart.
“Thank you for the aluminium”… – with an ironic approach Kilpper takes the foil, spreads it all over the gallery floor and demonstrates with a few examples what we can do with it today: wrapping your roasted chicken to keep it hot, wrapping the safety tags in the dressing room of a superstore to avoid them triggering the alarm or falsifying 50 ¤ notes.

2500 years ago, Sun Tsu already described “disguise” as an essential method of war conduct – creating false traces or concealing them completely. Spray bandage allegedly used by leftwing activists in Germany to avoid leaving their fingerprints. Or in recent days, when the Colombian Army in breach of the regulations of the Geneva conventions disguised themselves as members of the Red Cross and deceived the rebels to liberate Ingrid Betancourt.
Drawing and scribbling on press releases and invitation cards from galleries the artist has visited, Kilpper reveals a partial profile tracking his movements – in contrast to the efforts to hide. But are these traces the relevant ones or another form to disguise? And what about the authenticity of drawings after Bridget Riley, Merlin Carpenter, Jim Shaw, Thomas Erdelmeier or Mike Kelley? Is he camouflaging himself as a bohemian, messing up with his colleagues? In disguise there seems to be little truth.

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6. Juni – 24. August 2008

the world should remain for now as it is

6. Juni – 24. August 2008 
Eröffnung 6. Juni 2008, 19 Uhr

Lukas Einsele – Thomas Erdelmeier – Thomas Kilpper
The artists assembled here are characterized by a socio-political consciousness that is reflected in their artistic works and projects in various ways. The creative process becomes a constant confrontation with the origins and connections of the social and economic system as well as with the question of what role the individual can or is assigned in this context. Where can we find room for manoeuvre to help shape society, politics and the state? Where does the reality of civilization cease to be civil? To what extent do origin, society and economy construct the individual subject and determine our forms of communication? Using very different means, Lukas Einsele, Thomas Erdelmeier and Thomas Kilpper suggest the contradictions of a social order that in many areas presses for clarity, over-regulation and paradoxical morals. Social reality becomes a fund from which obvious questions are negotiated and from which one can draw both critically and lustfully. In this respect, the title of the exhibition “The world should initially remain as it is” could be formulated as a question or as a reversal.

Lukas Einsele (born 1963, lives in Darmstadt) shows a new work and his project “One step beyond – Reencounter with the Mine” (OSB) in the exhibition. It reports on different levels about victims of landmines and brings victims and mine into a visible relationship: Lukas Einsele travelled to heavily mined countries such as Angola, Afghanistan or Bosnia-Herzegovina and asked people who were wounded by a landmine to remember and tell him about the story of the accident. Einsele then produced black-and-white portraits of the narrators with a large-format camera. With the help of the reports and further research on military and mine maps and demining, he was able to draw conclusions about the possible type of mine that caused the “accident”. During his stays, Lukas Einsele took up other themes that revolve around the complex and monstrous: Mine clearance, mine clearance, rehabilitation. The starting point and central aspect of this project is memory as an active, image-generating process. For the numerous institutions in Germany and abroad in which OSB has been shown since 2001, Lukas Einsele develops forms of presentation tailored to the respective exhibition site, which always add to a subtle and equally penetrating image of this dark chapter. In the Kunsthalle Mainz, a small room within a room is created that corresponds to the floor plan at which “One step beyond” was first shown. The reproduced space and a selection of black-and-white portraits of the narrators correspond to a new video work by the artist in which four musicians memorize a classical piece of music. Here, the viewer attends a silent and at the same time highly charged performance without instruments.

The drawings, paintings and architectural models by Thomas Erdelmeier (born 1969, lives in Frankfurt/Main) are characterized by a keen sense of space. The plasticity, the extreme perspectives and the falling lines of flight appear like a reflex to an increasingly flat screen perception and at the same time as a mirror of an increasingly complex social system in which the subject tries to find his place and avoid disadvantages. The drawings, often the size of walls, some of them laid out as language and text spaces, merge different drawing languages and narrative styles. Many different elements and statements are interwoven as if they were a web, and they flash moments of both pessimism and confidence. The exhibition presents a selection of new paintings created since 2007. They largely leave the textual level, but not the multi-layered narrative. In the paintings, too, the virtuoso draughtsman, always drawing from the full, comes to bear. The dynamics of the image always also form an energetic field in which the artist takes a critical, stating and at the same time pleasurable approach to the questions that drive him about. Successful and exploitative forms of human communication, the question of participation in privileges as well as considerations about the religious origin of our present economic system and the resulting subject constructions are recurring themes.

The often monumental and extremely elaborate projects of Thomas Kilpper (born 1956, lives in Berlin) usually have two starting points. Starting from biographical stations, Thomas Kilpper’s artistic oeuvre always resonates with the sometimes direct confrontation with political realities. The concrete desire and insistence on design and co-determination as well as on changing social disparities form the artist’s spectrum of themes. The focus here is on the extent to which social or political questions are negotiable in the context of art. The project “Drowning Hercules” (2001), for example, shows that it can succeed: in a disused swimming pool, the artist created a ten-meter-high tree from all the wooden parts he could knock out of the rest of the building (built-in cupboards, doors, etc.). The tree was destroyed when the building was demolished. For a short time, Thomas Kilpper occupied the site, appropriated it, and returned the destroyed wooden parts as a sculptural image to their origins as a tree. The occupation of places and the handling of their history is another essential aspect of Kilpper’s work. For the Kunsthalle Mainz, Kilpper creates a space-filling installation consisting of about 20 drawings that float face down above the ground as a kind of parcours, literally turning the viewing upside down. The drawings are conceived as a biographical journey through time, which at the same time brings to mind formative socio-political events. Another installation, consisting of a frail and at the same time space-consuming wall, plays with the deconstruction of the elegance of the actual exhibition space and its architecture, which is focused on a concentrated view of art.

May 25 – June 24, 2007

Opening: Thursday, 24.5.2007, from 7pm
Exhibition from 25.5. to 24.6.2007
Opening hours: Thu/Fr 5-10pm, Sat/Sun 2-6pm

Kunstraum Düsseldorf
Himmelgeister Straße 107E,
Eingang Ulenbergstraße
40200 Düsseldorf
Tel. 0049-(0)211-8924193 oder | or 0049-(0)211-330237
www.duesseldorf.de/kunstraum

Tram: 706, 723
Bus: 827, 835, 836

With friendly support Lampei v.d. Sande GbR, Clearing out

The Berlin artist Thomas Kilpper lived in Düsseldorf from 1979 to 1992.
In 1979, he moved from Nuremberg to the Düsseldorf Academy and joined the Hueppi class. This change was associated with the hope of working in a more open-minded artistic climate. The then current political realities: Nuclear power plants, the WAA, the military coup in Turkey, apartheid… and in particular the increasingly acute possibility and danger of a nuclear war in Europe soon prompted Kilpper to turn increasingly to direct political debate.

For his exhibition “Von der fettecke zur revolution” at the Kunstraum Düsseldorf, the artist created a space-filling installation in which he recalls and fragmentarily traces the development of these years. In doing so, he draws on material that went through his hands for over eight years, when he earned his living by clearing out and moving house.

Now Kilpper has processed, deconstructed, assembled, knocked apart, nailed up again, and then arranged hundreds of old bulky refuse furniture into a methaphoric labyrinth. Here, both sublimated anger against the prevailing conditions and the realization of an aesthetic upheaval are expressed; here, a stuffy, ironic design of social interior architecture articulates itself as anti-IKEA.

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30 September – 29 October 2006

Pump House Gallery is delighted to invite you to the private view of:

PIGISBACK
Thomas Kilpper
Friday 29 September : 6.30 – 9.00pm
(an organic barbeque will be served)

Exhibition Dates: 30 September – 29 October 2006

Pump House Gallery is delighted to be collaborating with German artist Thomas Kilpper to develop an ambitious site-specific project in and outside of the gallery. This will be the artist’s first significant commission in London since 2001. Kilpper’s projects often respond to the socio-political context of a location, playfully interweaving local histories, current global issues and his political views. For this project he has taken a keen interest in the rich and complex history of Battersea Park and its surrounding environment. In particular he has researched the period when the park was transformed into a pig farm and allotments during World War II, as well as the diverse and unusual use of Battersea Power Station. This includes referencing the photo shoot for the iconic cover for Pink Floyd’s ‘Animals’ LP, which involved a giant inflatable pig. Through exploring these episodes Kilpper makes allusions to the present situation in Iraq.

The outcomes of this project are eclectic and include the transformation of the gallery’s outside space into an allotment growing organic vegetables created and looked after by Wandsworth Youth Offending Team , a kitchen inside the gallery to cook the resulting harvest and a giant pig sculpture made using trees cut down in Battersea Park. Kilpper has also engaged in a number of exciting collaborations with other artists. He has worked with Lukas Einsele to create a series of photographic works, Alexander Wolff to co- produce a new sound track fusing Pink Floyd with popular 1940’s war time songs and Endre Aalrust in making a film using footage from Monty Python’s ‘The Meaning of Life’ and Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Sabotage’.
Thomas Kilpper was born in Germany in 1956 and has received international critical acclaim for his dynamic and inventive practice. He has developed a number of important projects nationally and internationally, including The Ring, Orbit House, London 2000 in partnership with South London Gallery; Al Hissan, The Jenin Horse, Jenin, Palestine 2003; Ulrike Meinhof, Berlin 2004; Agenda 2010, Berlin 2005 and has been commissioned to make a new work for Momentum 2006: Nordic Festival of Contemporary Art.

Exhibition supported by the The Henry Moore Foundation, Arts Council England, Patrick Heide Art Projects, Goethe Institute Battersea Crime Prevention Panel, Wandsworth Youth Offending Team, Thrive and MFI Kitchens.

Open: Wednesday – Sunday 11am – 5pm
Closed Mon & Tues ADMISSION FREE
Pump House Gallery, Battersea Park, London SW11 4NJ. T: 020 7350 0523
pumphouse@wandsworth.gov.uk
www.wandsworth.gov.uk/gallery

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September -October 2006

Endre Aalrust and Thomas Kilpper

commissioned by and exhibited at momentum,
festival for contemporary art, moss nearby oslo, norway
september-october 2006

“The work that Endre Aalrust and Thomas Kilpper have made for Momentum … verges on satire. The artists have appropriated the elephant logo of the paper factory that borders the Moss Brewery (Momentum’s central venue) and deployed it with allegory of the town’s economic and cultural development…”
Mark Sladen, Co-Curator of Momentum 2006

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January 22– February 20, 2005

Drawings and other paperwork

VTO Gallery – 96 Teesdale Street – London E2 6PU

Curated by Thomas Kilpper in collaboration with Patrick Heide
Opening: January 21, 2005 from 6-10 pm

Lucie Beppler, Bernadette Corporation, Michael Beutler, Heide Deigert, Emmanuel Depoorter, Thomas Erdelmeier, Jeremy Glogan, Alex Hamilton, Thomas Kilpper, Dirk Krecker, Janne Lervik, Max Mason, Nils Norman, Olivia Plender, Miki Tschur, Klaus Weber, Amelie von Wulffen

The exhibition from our cold hands brings together drawings and other works on paper by 17 young artists with a wide variety of working methods and strategies. Works that contradict or complement each other, works that question and explore the limits and possibilities of this medium.

Klaus Weber shows mushroom drawings, which are created in a process lasting several days, solely through the spores of the mushrooms. It is thus quasi a form of “automated drawing” without direct drawing intervention by the artist.

Conversely, Heide Deigert shows distorted self-portraits that look like they were created by a computer, but are actually drawn by hand.

Alex Hamilton takes photographs of the Turner House in East London as a starting point, copies them, retouches and draws them into the copy, copies the drawing again, draws again into the copy and so on, until it is no longer clear how the whole thing was created and how it is to be defined: photo, drawing or copy?

In her comic master-piece, Olivia Plender questions the cliché of the ‘masterpiece’, draws her work in a classical style, but always presents it as a copy. She thus turns the copy into an original work of art and keeps the actual original under lock and key.

In contrast, Micki Tschur, who lives in the USA, shows very personal stories – excerpts from her sketchbook – “unfinished stories” as she calls them – as original drawings.

Norwegian-born Janne Lervik has her diary- and comic-like drawings tell bizarre stories about her adopted home Berlin.

Max Mason will produce an edition in the form of a CD for the exhibition. It contains a soundpiece, a kind of sound drawing that can be heard / ‘seen’ in the exhibition – and a classical drawing that cannot be seen in the exhibition. Only those who purchase the edition can see this drawing – e.g. at home on the screen – for everyone else it remains a virtual picture.

Dirk Krecker cuts the keys of old, mechanical typewriters into the paper and creates a minimalist pictorial language: he transforms the movable letters – printing tools – into his drawing pen and supplies fighter planes for this exhibition that are about to attack or crash.

Emmanuel Depoorter and Thomas Erdelmeier produce large-format drawings – Depoorter rather follows subjective horror and fear scenarios, whereby Erdelmeier’s text images draw us into an exuberant labyrinth of social questions and fields of conflict.

Lucie Beppler, on the other hand, devotes herself intensively to smaller formats with which she circles around complex themes from the personal and intimate – often injuring and rutting her leaves with cutting tools – she ‘draws’, among other things, with a knife. For this exhibition, she has created works on untreated photographic paper that seem to have been created by chance and that evoke associations with telephone scribbles, as most of us have probably done many times before.

Thomas Kilpper drew with the chainsaw by cutting the entire parquet floor of a basketball hall of the US Army and turning it into a printing block for a woodcut. In this exhibition he shows the former Nazi secret service officers around Reinhard Gehlen, who after the war were ‘trained’ by the CIA to become agents of the Federal Intelligence Service at this location – near Frankfurt.

From a technical point of view, Nils Norman is quite in the present day: in his illustrations he draws primarily on the computer and its software: his pencil is the mouse. With it, he develops a system-critical pictorial world in which his ironic suggestions for repairs and improvements to various social problems flow into.

The artist group Bernadette Corporation, which lives in Berlin and New York, provides a computer-generated image of a blow-job obtained from the Internet for the exhibition. By pulling it onto canvas and stretcher frame, they also question a central cornerstone of artistic production: to what extent do stretcher frames and canvas help a work become real art and a real value?

Jeremy Glogan seems to be faithful to artistic tradition by using brushes, pencils and pencils – but he plays with the different styles of art history, breaking and discarding his work over and over again.

Amelie von Wulffen does not only integrate photography into her drawings, with her overpaintings she creates a completely new basis for her image production. She builds almost dreamlike spaces in order to dedicate herself to private stories or worn out and questionable personalities like Alexander Solchenyzin with delicate strokes in the next moment.

Michael Beutler builds low-tech machines and will produce and distribute on the floor tenfold enlarged ‘Sunkist-Tetra-Pack-boxes’ for the exhibition. Does he thereby provoke a de-constructive game or is it the occupation or use of space?

Thomas Kilpper
Patrick Heide

More information about:
info@vtogallery.com – http://www.vtogallery.com
patrickheide@hotmail.com or phone ++44 (0)790 0215 317

February 05 – March 13, 2005

FLEISCH | Showroom

Michael Dreher + Thomas Kilpper
AGENDA 2010

Café Moscow | Karl-Marx-Allee 34 | 10178 Berlin-Mitte
OPENING: Friday, 04.02.05 – 20.00 o’clock
Duration of exhibition: 05.02.05 – 13.03.05 [24h/7d]

The two artists Michael Dreher (Frankfurt/Main) and Thomas Kilpper (Berlin) have developed their installation Agenda 2010 for the Berlin exhibition space “Fleisch” on Karl-Marx-Allee, in which the urgency of a fundamental innovation of the various models of society is the theme and starting point.
On one side is Karl Marx, one of the historical founders of the communist idea.
On the other side is money – the engine of profit and the centre of capitalist society, here in the form of the three most powerful Western currencies, the yen, the euro and the dollar. Both sides are exposed to specific natural attacks and ‘basic needs of the base’.
It remains to be seen whether and in what condition the opponents will survive this game.
Agenda 2010 is a six-week ‘work in progress’ that will be seen and observed around the clock until 13 March.

CONTACT: info@fleischzeigt.de | www.fleischzeigt.de
Tel. 0160 2956151 – CHUGHTAI

November 5 – 25, 2005

Exhibition:

Thomas Kilpper in the gallery Wildwechsel
http://www.wolfstaedter.de/
Rotlintstr. 98, 60389 Frankfurt, Germany
Phone 069-738416
bicycle shop

Vernissage: 4 November 2005 7pm
Exhibition: 5 November – 25 November 2005
Opening hours: Wed. Thu. Fr. 4 – 7 pm

Thomas Kilpper, who lives in Berlin, chooses the most difficult of all paths an artist can take. In his work he does not shy away from large to monumental formats and complex contents. On the other hand, he develops an astonishing variety and love of detail, going into depth.

Kilpper became known to a wider public through his large-format woodcut projects from 1998 to 2000 in empty buildings near Frankfurt and in London.
Here he really worked his way through: the resistance of the parquet floor and its partly comical, partly loaded history. Near Frankfurt it was a former Nazi military camp, which after the war became the site of numerous interrogations and training missions of the US army and where barely two years after the end of the war, with the help of the CIA, the forerunner of the German foreign secret service, the BND, the so-called “Organisation Gehlen”, was launched. Surprisingly, this happened under the same leadership as the Nazi secret service “Fremde Heere Ost”: Reinhard Gehlen.
In London it was a place where an octagonal church was erected in the 18th century, which was radically reused almost a hundred years later: the pulpit was replaced by a boxing ring, in which 30 years of important and popular boxing fights took place – until during the 2nd World War Hitler’s air force reduced the building to rubble and ashes. Orbit House, which was built on the same site after the war, initially served the British Army as a secret location for their printing workshop until the Oriental Department of the British Library moved here and, among other things, kept the oldest known woodcut in the world, the “Diamond Sutra” from China, here.
Kilpper goes to archives, asks local residents or former employees… then he approaches: “With heavy equipment, the ghosts of their own past are carved into the smooth wooden floor, -sawn, -milled, -cut, -chopped, -choped, -choped. Later, the scratched landscape is treated with miraculous artistry. The prints are removed with paint, paper and fabrics.” (Else Gabriel on Thomas Kilpper)

At the invitation of the Goethe-Institut, Kilpper travelled to the occupied territories of Palestine in 2003 and, together with Palestinian youths, built a larger-than-life horse sculpture out of metal from destroyed houses and cars. In the Arab world, the horse is a symbol of freedom and enjoys enormous popularity.
Against constantly recurring curfews, controls, tank and air force deployments, this project was an attempt to reopen play and movement spaces in public space. After its completion, the horse was successfully pulled from checkpoint to checkpoint through the entire West Bank to Ramallah, Arafat’s destroyed seat of government, together with some workshop participants – despite all warnings. As if by a miracle, the horse opened almost all the otherwise locked gates for a brief moment. “You have to see the film Thomas Kilpper made about it.
…made with… The described details of everyday life are full of absurd obstacles, they also deal with great hospitality, and with being settled in temporary as well as hostilities…” (Else Gabriel)

Thomas Kilpper has planned a new installation – bicycle shop – for the Wildwechsel Gallery in Frankfurt.
Bicycles will be offered for sale and defective bikes will be accepted for repair. The gallery owner and art dealer becomes a bicycle seller and bicycle mechanic – the gallery visitor possibly a bicycle buyer or customer of a bicycle repair.
Kilpper wants to question the function and identity of the location as well as the social position of its protagonists – and at the same time encourage a form of ecologically meaningful mobility. The bikes sold during the exhibition are signed by the artist.

March 31- May 05, 2004

Press release: thomas kilpper in the gallery meerrettich in the pavilion at the volksbühne rosa-luxemburg-platz, berlin
contact: 030 28879710 – email: info AT meerrettich.net

ulrike meinhof – exhibition from 31.03. to 09.05.04
at the pavillon am rosa-luxemburg-platz, thomas kilpper opens his exhibition with the sculpture of a larger-than-life head: ulrike meinhof on march 31, 20:00.

for almost 100 years, the pink luxury square has played a wide variety of roles under various names as a stage for political disputes and monuments. numerous demonstrations by the left, such as after the murder of pink luxembourg and karl liebknecht, but also threateningly staged marches by the Nazis began here.
in 1928 the kpd tried to erect a monument to lenin on the site of today’s pavilion.
however, the then berlin senate rejected the plan. only a few years later, the national socialists erected the horst-wessel monument there instead. for some time now, an attempt has been made to erect a monument to pink luxembourg with a work of art.

with ulrike meinhof, thomas kilpper wants to extend the specific politicization of this place into the present, but not without creating new breaks and critically questioning the stylisations and clichés that accompany it. with his sculpture, he also refers to the johann-kresnik production of the same name on the people’s stage in 1993.

ulrike meinhof stands like hardly any other personality of the west german post-war left for a long road of political confrontation with the powerful of this state, on which she radicalized herself from a critical journalist to a revolutionary underground fighter. in the 1950s, she was active as a student against the rearmament and nuclear armament of the brd, before publishing political essays for more than ten years, especially in the magazine konkret, and finally, at the height of the us war against vietnam, in 1970 she herself took up arms and co-founded the red army faction.

1972, after 2 years of large-scale search and postering on every advertising pillar, she was arrested. at times she had to spend her time in completely deserted tracts, isolated from the outside world. during the great tribal home trial, she sat in the dock with andreas baader, gudrun ensslin and jan carl raspe. shortly after she delivered an extensive speech and indictment in court against the us-American “engagement” in indochina, she was found dead in her cell on may 9, 1976. the state did not succeed in clearing up the contradictions and justified doubts about his suicide thesis and completely clarifying the circumstances of his death.

ulrike meinhof would have been 70 years old this year. after her death, her brain was removed without the consent of her relatives and kept for over a quarter of a century in laboratories of german universities for “scientific purposes”. as early as 1973, the public prosecutor’s office wanted to intervene in her brain against ulrike meinhof’s will, an intervention that could only be prevented by international publicity and criticism.
the media treatment of the “brain rape” shows the return of this old attempt to pathologize ulrike meinhof and thus the pathologization of revolutionary politics in general. in contrast, the artist sets the reality of the works, which ulrike meinhof created herself, against her texts and letters from 1960-76.

ulrike meinhof
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ausstellungseröffnung
rosa-luxemburg-platz
berlin

project outline
to the Sculpture Biennale Münsterland 2005

In cooperation with interested local initiatives (skater, youth centre, citizens’ initiative for environmental protection, vocational orientation centre…) I would like to present a usable sculpture with young people from Ahaus and the surrounding area in a two- to three-week workshop as part of the Skulptur-Biennale Münsterland 2005.

• 1/2 castor x 2xL x 2xH x 2xB = half-pipe –

build.

The finished sculpture (halfpipe) will then be moved through the district in a joint parade – a Castor transport on “Day X”, as it were – before it is permanently installed in the castle garden and handed over to the public for use.

Castors to Halfpipes!

The recent history of Ahaus and the district is decisively determined by the debate about the use of nuclear energy, especially the nuclear waste storage facility – the so-called central fuel element interim storage facility (BEZ).
Since 1992, radioactive waste from various German nuclear power plants has been stored in a huge hall on the outskirts of Ahaus. How topical this topic is is illustrated by the fact that a few days ago a new storage and transport permit for 18 Castor containers from a former research reactor near Dresden was issued by the Lüneburg Higher Administrative Court. Hardly any other conflict has so much danger potential for humans and environment, as well as social explosive material, which the society threatens to tear apart sometimes.
Numerous yellow crosses of the protest (day X) testify to this conflict and have become an integral part of the cityscape of Ahaus.

In a certain contrast to this is the fact that, according to those affected, youth and leisure activities leave much to be desired. There has been a halfpipe on the outskirts of the city on the Oark leisure area for some time. Due to resident complaints this is to be torn down however – contrary to the atomic waste camp -. The construction of a half pipe for skaters and inliners in the castle park would be conceivable (central location, no direct residents) and desirable.