Exhibition Texts

From filmmaker to political actionist, from theatre and opera director to actor and visual artist – Christoph Schlingensief’s practice transcends genre boundaries and generates exuberant layers of materiality and meaning. His projectsare intense and aesthetically overwhelming, cultivating ambiguity and often made in collaboration. Es ist nicht mehr mein Problem, macht eure Scheiße alleine (It’s not my problem anymore, deal with your own shit) gathers works from the late 1990s and the 2000s: from media-savvy actions that made use of theatrical techniques to intervene on the political stage, to artistic installations, to opera productions challenging the assumptions of the genre itself.

In Schlingensief’s creations, art becomes a mode of questioning social reality. Through precisely targeted provocation and humorous parodies, but also by deliberately reproducing discriminatory language and images, he continuously pushed the limits of what was considered acceptable, of what could be done and what could be said. Schlingensief never shied away from open confrontation with his audience, or from questioning his own artistic role. While his works are firmly rooted in the concerns of their time, their relevance here and now becomes ever clearer: from his early engagements with questions of colonialism, right-wing extremism and discrimination, to his insistent demand for dialogue and confrontation, his work touches on essential debates of the present time. A contemporary perspective on Schlingensief’s projects, which addressed the societal conflicts of their day through activism and performance, reveals theircontinuing significance for our own moment.

The installation Kaprow City is one of the few remaining stage constructions by Schlingensief. This revolving stage, originally designed to be entered by visitors, was created for a theatre piece of the same title at the Volksbühne in Berlin. The play speculates about Princess Diana’s last hours before the car accident that killed her in 1997. In the play, the audience members were spread across the 18 rooms of the revolving stage, allowing them to witness only fractions of the performance. What took place on stage was also filmed, allowing the spectators outside the structure to follow sequences via a live projection. The work thus reflects how perceptions of reality via the media always remain fragmentary. Schlingensief’s approach to the project was inspired by the US artist Allan Kaprow’s work 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959), which presented the viewers with artistic elements and everyday actions across 18 different rooms. Like Kaprow, Schlingensief removed the distinction between stage and audience, calling into question the boundaries between reality and fiction.

In 2007, Schlingensief transformed the revolving stage into an artistic installation for a presentation at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zurich, marking an important shift in his practice from theatre to the visual arts. In this version, the separate spaces of Kaprow City became screening rooms in which footage of the theatre performance intertwines with fragments from earlier film projects, including Fremdverstümmelung (External Mutilation, 2007), as well as personal Super 8 recordings from Schlingensief’s childhood. The view of These images is obstructed with deliberately placed transparencies. A clear picture, a straightforward narrative do not exist: instead, we see layerings, double or multiple exposures, following the principle of visual overstimulation running through all of Schlingensief’s work.

At the heart of Christoph Schlingensief’s Church of Fear is the artist’s engagement with fear, insecurity and state control. The project was developed against the backdrop of reactions to the attack on the World Trade Center in New York City on 11 September 2001, carried out by the Islamist terrorist organisation al-Qaeda. Military invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the expansion of domestic mass surveillance, were met with broad political and societal support in many countries of the West – though the legitimacy of these measures was at times disputed. Racist media reporting shaped the public debate, linking terrorism with Muslims in general and stoking popular anxieties. On the day the United States invaded Iraq, Schlingensief established the Church of Fear as a parodic religious community, devoted to individual and collective fears and their weaponisation.

As part of this project, Schlingensief delivered sermons and performed ritualistic actions focussing on the worries and fears of the public and the underlying societal developments. During these interventions, most of which were held in public space, Schlingensief called on all those present to join his community of faith. For Curch of Fear, Schlingensief appropriated cultural and religious elements – from a Christian church building to the Islamic call to prayer of the muezzin, to masks evoking voodoo practices. These elements reflect the collective anxiety about the allegedly “other”, and the manipulation of fear for the purpose of stabilising power relations. The wooden church exhibited here was first shown at the 2003 Venice Biennale, where Schlingensief also organised a pole-sitting competition. During the hours spent sitting on top of poles, participants were meant to meditate on their fears in order to better understand them and therefore become more capable of guarding against their political co-optation.

Christoph Schlingensief repeatedly and intensely engaged with the work of composer Richard Wagner (1813–1883). In Wagner’s opera The Flying Dutchman (1843), a curse is placed on a sea captain during a voyage, dooming him to wander the ocean for eternity. Here, we see a film sequence that was created in the context of Schlingensief’s production of the opera for the Teatro Amazonas in Manaus, Brazil. His opera brought together themes of life, death and redemption with ecological and postcolonial contexts. One of these contexts is the history of the rubber trade. Profits from this industry financed the construction of the Teatro Amazonas itself, a late-19th century venue for European “high culture”. The agricultural production of this raw material thrived primarily on the destructive exploitation of the Indigenous population and of local ecosystems.

Drawing on Wagner, Schlingensief regarded the opera as a “total artwork”, which ought to combine music, dance and architecture, and be accessible to a wide audience. Wagner’s late work, particularly, combined the unifying power of opera with the notion of an ethnically and culturally defined community – “the German people” – an idea based on nationalism and antisemitism. Schlingensief’s opera projects, by contrast, aimed to create an “artwork for everybody” that would overcome boundaries between art and society as well as between different cultural contexts. For The Flying Dutchman, Schlingensief collaborated with the residents of Manaus, including elements of local dance and music in an attempt to disentangle opera from its Eurocentric and elitist tendencies. Controversially, Schlingensief also made use of colonial motifs: in the opera production, he included 16 mm footage he shot in the guise of an “adventurer” in the Amazonas region, which was meant to serve as a critical comment on his own role as a European artist. In these films we see members of the opera company as well as the residents and the surroundings of Manaus, in a style suggestive of images from colonial times.

The African Twin Towers connects themes of German colonialism and global imperialist exploitation with mythological motifs. The original script for the project was based on Schlingensief’s conflictual collaboration with the Wagner family in the context of the Bayreuther Festspiele (2004–2007). In the wake of this experience, he planned a fictional story about the descendants of the German composer attempting to organise a music festival in Namibia. After a screenplay based on this idea fell through, the project focused on a process shaped by cooperation and improvisation. Together with actors as well as residents of the Namibian city of Lüderitz and the nearby areas, Schlingensief re-enacted Germanic sagas from Wagner’s operas, classics of Western film and scenes from colonial times. 

The title of the project alludes to an imbalance in media coverage: while threats to the West, like the September 11 attacks, dominated headlines in the media for weeks, the consequences of German crimes in Namibia and of the genocide against the Ovaherero and the Nama were barely mentioned. Placing German “high cultural” images on one level with representations of the violent colonisation of Namibia (1884–1914), Schlingensief brings this largely repressed segment of German history into the foreground. In the film sequences, he exposes racist acts through their exaggerated portrayal while also reflecting on his own role as a German filmmaker in Namibia in deliberately provocative and at times dubious stagings. Using performative means and an overwhelming flood of images to recreate historical events, Schlingensief emphasises the (im-)possibility of grasping and representing colonial violence.

In Freakstars 3000, Christoph Schlingensief created parodic versions of TV formats like talent shows and political talk shows in order to fundamentally challenge societal norms. The project was a continuation of his long-running collaboration with performers with disabilities – an aspect of his work that was controversial from the very beginning. Among the performers who participated were residents of the Tiele-Winckler-Haus, a facility for people with disabilities located in Berlin Lichtenrade. The six-part talent show that Schlingensief shot for the television channel Viva Plus included a fictional competition for the purpose of casting members of a pop music group that would perform at the Volksbühne theatre in Berlin. Through satirical mimicry, Schlingensief ruthlessly exposed the mechanisms underlying these TV genres, pushing them beyond the limits of absurdity.

The title of this work connects contemporary entertainment media with the so-called freak shows of the 20th century, which involved the sensationalist display of disabilities at public fairs or in circuses. Schlingensief’s allusions to the “freak show” can beunderstood as a provocative way of raising questions about self-determined representation and societal participation of people with disabilities. In the open-ended structure of Freakstars 3000, the talent show participants were actively involved in shaping the artistic process through improvisation. In the political talk show segment, they also appear as actors, portraying well-known politicians. They reverse relations of gaze and power by offering satirical commentary on members of the dominant society. Their autonomous presence confronts the audience and ruthlessly displays the way that the media produces and disseminates discriminatory ideals and images of bodies and social behaviour.

Christoph Schlingensief collaborated with people with disabilities in numerous works. As it was not possible within the scopeof this exhibition to determine the preferred terms of selfidentification of all participants, we use the collective term “people with disabilities” throughout.

In Hamlet – This Is Your Family, Christoph Schingensief combined William Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet (around 1600) with contemporary debates about how to deal with far-right extremists. This was his way of reacting to a “reintegration programme” for neo-Nazis that the German government had launched the same year. Instead of anonymous counselling and support, Schlingensief demanded that ex-Nazis be publicly confronted and made to discuss their views and their alleged departure from the radical right. In his production of Hamlet for the theatre Schauspielhaus Zürich, later shown at the Volksbühne in Berlin, Schlingensief included neo-Nazis who were apparently ready to leave the far-right scene.

In Shakespeare’s play, Prince Hamlet learns from his father’s ghost that he was murdered by Hamlet’s uncle. The tragedy turns around the so-called mousetrap scene: Hamlet stages a play that re-enacts his father’s murder, and sees his suspicions confirmed by his uncle’s reaction. In Schlingensief’s controversial production, the neo-Nazis were brought on stage for this scene, musically accompanied by droning rightwing rock and with uniforms and emblems alluding to Nazism’s visual codes. In the style of Hamlet’s mistrust and search for the truth, Schlingensief created space for the question of whether these neo-Nazi “dropouts” had really left their far-right ideology behind them.

The performances were followed by provocative actions held in public spaces in Berlin and Zurich, with Schlingensief drawing attention to the “reintegration programme” as well as the electoral success of the Swiss People’s Party (SVP). Though this project was firmly situated in the world of the 2000s, Schlingensief’s controversial insistence on openly debating with the radical right has come to seem more pertinent than ever.

Chance 2000 was a political party founded by Christoph Schlingensief, linking art, activism and democratic participation. With its motto “Failure as Opportunity”, the party offered a platform for those insufficiently represented by the political system or marginalised by capitalist society, such as people who are unemployed or unhoused, receive benefits or live with disabilities. With the campaign slogan “Vote for Yourself!”, Schlingensief called on everyone involved to take up the problem of their own political representation. He also looked for candidates to stand for his party at public events, like demonstrations of unemployed people. Anyone who wanted to run for office had a chance to secure a spot on the ballot by collecting enough signatures and was supported by Schlingensief’s party during their campaign.

Chance 2000 was founded in a circus tent outside Berlin’s Volksbühne and shortly afterwards was admitted to stand in the 1998 German federal election. Stunts like this “election campaign circus”, with its chaotic and bizarre theatrical interludes, or stagedbankruptcies and party splits, made the project into a biting parody of the political system. The high point was reached at a campaign event held at Wolfgangsee, a lake in Austria where then German Chancellor Helmut Kohl had his holiday home. Schlingensief called for six million unemployed people to go swimming in the lake in order to raise the water level and flood the political opponent Kohl out of his property. Despite its limited electoral success, Chance 2000 became a widely discussed example of artistic activism that explored new approaches to democratic participation, including artistic happenings and practical politics, protest and play.

Ursuppe. Birth of a Nation was created as part of the walk-through theatre installation Area 7: A Matthew Expedition (2006) at the Burgtheater in Vienna before being exhibited by Schlingensief as an independent installation. At the centre of the theatre space was a so-called animatograph – a rotating stage Schlingensief had built in the Area 7 township near Lüderitz in Namibia and then reconstructed in Vienna. In the 19th century, “Animatograph” was a term for an early type of film projector and literally means “soul writer”. Schlingensief’s animatographs, as they had been previously created in Iceland and Brandenburg, intertwines the life-worlds and image material deriving from the site of their creation with elements from Nordic heroic sagas, opera, film classics and art history. This polyvalent interweaving of material from the everyday, the arts and myth recalls human consciousness, which combines and layers sensory impressions and memories.

For Ursuppe. Birth of a Nation, Schlingensief placed portraits of the artists Jonathan Meese (*1970), Andy Warhol (1928–1987) and Hermann Nitsch (1938–2022), the singer Michael Jackson (1958–2009) or the filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl (1902–2003) inside prams. These are Schlingensief’s visual metaphor for the cradles of the self-fashioning pursued by artists, who often participate in creating the myths that surround their works and personas. Alluding to this, the title term Ursuppe (primordial soup) refers to the mixture of chemicals from which life originally sprang. The subtitle, Birth of a Nation, is borrowed from two eponymous films by D. W. Griffith (1915) and Jonas Mekas (1997). While Griffith’s film glorifies the racism of the United States, Mekas collected private footage of artists who set out to deliberately counter such racist cultural production. Mekas’ film also includes Riefenstahl, however, who portrayed herself as an innocent “fellow traveller” after the war, despite having made Nazi Propaganda.

This video installation bundles together different films from Schlingensief’s opera projects into a single composition. Hasenverwesung (Hare Decay) and Drosophila Melanogaster were projected onto the stage in his productions of the Wagner operas Parsifal (2004–2007) and The Flying Dutchman (2007). The films do not merely reflect the plots of the operas but can also be seen as metaphors for central themes from Wagner’s oeuvre – the cycle of life, decay and rebirth as well as redemption.

Also included are the films Holländer 2C. Ausweitung der Dunkelphase (Dutchman 2C. Extension of the Dark Phase), in which Schlingensief records nocturnal orchestra rehearsals in the Brazilian rainforest outside Manaus, and Fremdverstümmelung (External Mutilation). The latter was created in the context of the planned opera Freax (2007), and references Schlingensief’s enduring collaboration with performers with disabilities. It recreates scenes from Tod Browning’s horror film Freaks (1932), which is set in a so-called freak show. This form of entertainment from the 20th century involved people performing at fairs and circuses. Caught between self-determined performance and simply being exhibited, their bodies became an “attraction” merely because they diverged from socially dominant body ideals. Browning’s horror film tells the story of a group of such performers who seize autonomy for themselves and take revenge on their treacherous non-disabled colleagues. This video installation brings together the central themes from Schlingensief’s engagement with opera: the attempt to dissolve its exclusive and eurocentric tendencies, his collaboration with people on the far side of normative body ideals and the question of how art can open up spaces that simultaneously unify and provoke.

From his very first films onward, the art of Christoph Schlingensief (1960–2010) consistently attracted aesthetic and political controversy. Early on, he developed his signature principle of layering and aesthetic overwhelm – a practice of working at the margins of the perceptible, where new narrative spaces emerge.

Schlingensief was already enthusiastic about film as a child and in his teenage years. In the 1980s, he worked as an assistant to the experimental filmmaker Werner Nekes in Mülheim an der Ruhr and directed numerous films of his own. His first productions for the theatre followed in the early 1990s – at Berlin’s Volksbühne, Vienna’s Burgtheater and at the Schauspielhaus Zürich. Parallel to this work, he made multiple feature films addressing aspects of German history, including colonialism, National Socialism and ist aftermath as well as the collapse of the GDR.

In the late 1990s and 2000s, Schlingensief was increasingly in the public eye for his politically charged interventions, while also developing a distinctive style in theatre and opera production. His actionist projects outside of the theatre had an impact that extended far beyond the world of art and garnered international attention. In 2008, he was diagnosed with lung cancer, an experience that shaped his late works. One year after his death in 2010, he was awarded the Golden Lion for his work at the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale.