GALERIE OTTO SCHWEINS A dead man.

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GALERIE OTTO SCHWEINS

A dead man, a soldier, is lying onward the floor. He's on his back, his leg outstretched. A brown branch that appears to originate from an unusual plant is boring its way by means of his head. It's like an of advanced age horror film: brutal, but also harmless and artificial. the two man and tree are made of the cheap foam material used in the building trade for sealing joints. They've been spray painted: the man recent the tree dark brown.

upon a monitor sitting on the floor in a far corner of the swing behind the corpse a video is playing. There are buildings settle in a green landscape. They are subordinate to construction--or have they already been destroyed? The camera influences slowly across the walls, showing stairs, unglazed window openings, doorways without doors. The buildings consider unreal, like stage sets. No commentary, no music accompanies the images; now and then single in kind hears the rustling of leaves or the chirping of birds. The images provide no ball of thread as to what has taken place.

couple large photographs: One shows a wall with a cylindrical opening in front of which stands an unmade bed--as if it had been unexpectedly abandoned. The other is of a window with threadbare curtains, no sign of life--again, a sensation of abandonment. In the nearest space hang six more photographs, showing the same houses as in the video, wilded in a green landscape, a spirit town. But what is going upon here? The buildings in the photographs examine harmless, normal, just a bit go proceed down and shabby. Nothing intimates danger, a great deal less threat. And yet[ldots]

These are houses, an entire town in fact, that the British army built in Ruhleben, forward the outskirts of Berlin, as a practice site for military occupation. They built a community for approximately 5000 inhabitants with its be in possession of freeway exit, supermarket, church--everything that belongs in a real town-in order to simulate house-to-house combat. The state and city police of Berlin still train there. Andree Korpys and Markus Loffler illegally pierceed this area, which is completely off-limits to the public. These photographs (all, like the video, titled Ruhleben, were taken illegally. The exhibition itself therefore constitutes a conspiratorial action.

Although Korpys and Loffler have lengthy been following the traces of violence, what interests them isn't the violent act itself in the way that much as the site in which it appears For example, as in the common exhibition, a town where battles have been rehearsed. Or, previously, a bank that was robbed; the Federal Administration building in Karlsruhe, against which RAF (R Army Faction) terrorists planned an attack; apartments in which assassinations and robberies have been conceived. Soberly compiled documentation is mixed in their work with invented reports and photographs, blurring the boundary between the real and the imagined. And now such stories reveal much of the reality of violence. Violent acts are conceived and execut in places just like any other. These houses used simply for combat training are carefully numbered, built according to blueprint, bureaucratically maintained. Korpys and Loffler one time spoke of their interest in an "aesthetic of violence." It is a banal aesthetic they bring to light, if it were not that like the banality of evil, of which Hannah Arendt formerly spoke, it is not delivered of horror.

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