ERSAN MONDTAG

Ersan Mondtag's contribution to the German Pavilion at the 60th Venice Art Biennale is an ark of remembrance for the ghosts of Germany's past, who created the country's prosperity without ever being adequately recognized for it.

The elaborate installation tells the story of Ersan Mondtag's grandfather, Hasan Aygün, who came to Berlin in 1962 as a “guest worker” from a village in Anatolia. He worked there for the Eternit company for 28 years. Before he could begin his retirement, he died of a lung disease caused by processing asbestos products.

Different stages and aspects of Hasan Aygün's biography are transformed on three levels in the teardrop-shaped clay building. The installation, with its many biographical and poetic details, the dusty and gloomy atmosphere, forms the stage for a performance of the family’s experiences up to the of the grandfather´s death. It is a story of a struggeling life in cramped conditions and it is condensed into a silent theater with absurd features.

Multimedia installation; earth, steel, wood, fabric, furniture, everyday objects, video

For Ersan Mondtag, Langgaard's opera, which heralds a sparking frenzy of doom, is a parable of our times. Socio- political themes, such as the fragmentation of society, the hardening of public discourse and the intensifying climate debate shine through in his visually stunning production.

Despite these references, Mondtag’s over-aesthetised visual language leaves room for Langgaard’s multifaceted and dazzling music, in which large sections are purely orchestral: A group of dancers translates Langgaard’s composition into a gripping language of movement. In his expressionist stage aesthetic, Mondtag references the visual arts of the time when ANTIKRIST was created, while simultaneously creating a surreal world where the laws of physics seem to have been suspended.

The new production of the anti-fascist folk opera by Kurt Weill and Georg Kaiser, which premiered in only three cities after the Nazis seized power in 1933, becomes a contemporary piece about the threat to art in Ersan Mondtag’s adaptation. The coproduction by Opera Ballet Vlaanderen and Nancy Opera transfers the story about class conflicts and possible friendship between enemies to the year 2033.

With this theater within the theater, “Der Silbersee” takes on a new political explosiveness, developed in elaborate stage designs with many art quotations as a caustic satire on any abuse of power.

In a doubling of reality and almost without text, Ersan Mondtag's play “De Living” tells a private story of despair that is intertwined with a historical one.

The suicide of a woman in her kitchen is also a story about the liberation from the trauma caused by the atrocious regime of the Belgian King Leopold II in the Congo. The events leading up to the moment when the lonely woman sticks her head into the gas stove developed with the twins Doris and Nathalie Bokongo Nkumu into an unfolding of history in parallel universes.

The synchronicity of their imprisonment in fear and depression dissolves into two possible outcomes in the course of the performance. One fatal and one optimistic. In addition to the systematic mirroring and the breaking of patterns, the use of smells is an impressive artistic effect, olfactorily guiding the reception of this silent double story.

What will the world look like in the future if social and technological developments progress as rapidly as they have in recent decades?

When artificial intelligence has left human intelligence behind and dominates all areas of life? What will become of humans - these unpredictable, flawed, slow and sentimental beings?

Sibylle Berg's play WONDERLAND AVE. is set in a museum of humanity, a memorial to the once dominant species, whose physicality is now primarily preserved in paintings, photo installations and sculptures. Sometimes naked and carnal as in Ron Mueck's work, sometimes renaissance-like and damned as in a fall from hell.

In this bitter and comical swan song to humanity, five robots that could have come straight out of a Picasso painting control two pathetic specimens who reflect one last time on what has gone wrong with their world, in which they felt so selfrighteously in control.

The starting point for Mondtag’s production was a myth about Maria Callas. To achieve her dream figure, the world famous opera singer is said to have ingested a tapeworm with a glass of champagne. The legend claims that the parasite led to an astonishing weight loss of 50 kilograms
within a short period of time.

Callas’ uncompromising endeavours to shape her appearance according to her ideal vision, and its flipside - the dissolution of her own body - formed the leitmotifs of the exhibition.

A scenic parcours transformed the museum into a stage with winding paths to encounter bordercrossers and doppelgangers, silent rebels and failed existences.

The tapeworm-stage presented works from Kader Attia, Miriam Cahn, Marlene Dumas, On Kawara, Teresa Margolles, Bruce Nauman, Thomas Ruff, Rosemarie Trockel, Andy Warhol and many others as connected parts of an ongoing narration about irritated bodies.

In the dark forest the muezzin calls, the father returns home with the ax and goes into the cellar, a very fat girl shakes the house with her defiant stomping.

In “Tyrannis” by Ersan Mondtag there is always a fairytale atmosphere, but of the eerie kind. The red-haired family with their avatar movements, which can be observed via surveillance cameras in their rooms and live in a strange kitchen-living room like in a human zoo, does not speak, lives according to fixed rules rituals and hides secrets. Have terrible things happened in the past or are the zombie-like souls of single-family homes just waiting to happen? Associations with horror films and computer games, David Lynch and the Brothers Grimm, but also with the narrow middle class à la Fassbinder and Christoph Marthaler's bashful staff arise when patiently contemplating Mondtag's room world dreams.

The powerful imagery creates an intimate horror of everyday life in an enchantingly stubborn atmosphere.