MAG3
You all learn to see and not to stare (...) The womb this crawled from is still going strong.*
ON THE 70TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE END OF WORLD WAR TWO AND THE LIBERATION FROM NAZISM
Video and Language Installation: OT by Gue SCHMIDT
Opening: Friday 6th May 2015, 19:30
project room MAG3, Schiffamtsgasse 17, A 1020 Vienna

On the project: Burghart SCHMIDT

Duration of the exhibition: 09.05. - 29.05.2015
Opening times: Tues. - Fri., 17:30 - 21:00

In connection: KUNSTRADIO - OE1: Sunday, 10th May 2015, 23:03
www.kunstradio.at

AFTER SEVENTY YEARS: EUROPEAN POLITICS IN HITLER'S SHADOW
Talk: Friedrich TOMBERG (Berlin)
Wednesday, 13th May 2015, 19:30
project room MAG3, Schiffamtsgasse 17, A 1020 Vienna
On 8th May 1945 the German Wehrmacht surrendered to the Soviet Union in Karlshorst near Berlin. The day before, on 7th May, the same had already happened in the west in Reims where they had surrendered to the Allied Forces.
However, in Asia and the Pacific the horror had not yet come to an end. War ended there not until 2nd September 1945 after the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (06.08. and 09.08.) This closed one of the darkest chapters of human history.

The war, largely unleashed by the German Reich under Adolf Hitler and his National Socialists, had cost the lives of 34.5 million people only in Europe in the most important warring countries like Germany, the USSR, Poland, Yugoslavia, France, Great Britain and the USA.
About 11 million people were murdered in concentration camps, extermination camps and prisons.
Globally, the loss of 68.8 million lives had to be mourned

By means of four linguistically parallel levels of a chronological table of German-Austrian history, the project acoustically retraces this process, starting in 1933 with Hitler's assumption of power in Germany and ending in 1945.
The four levels, consisting of politics, economy, social situation and cultural policy, mesh or overlap acoustically and thus refer to the total meshing of economy, politics and ideology, a tendency which still persists..
The texts, spoken by four people (female/male), collaged with original recordings, can be heard in real as well as in the radio space (OE1 - Kunstradio/ 10.05.2015, 23:03

Parts of these texts were taken from the catalogue of the exhibition: Art in the Third Empire - Documents of Submission (Kunstverein Frankfurt, 1975; authors i.a.: Klaus Wolbert, Dieter Bartetko and Ulrich Wanitzek). They have been revised and complemented by more recent findings.
The representation of NS cultural policy in this context is primarily based on the work by Hildegard Brenner, Art Policy of National Socialism, Hamburg 1963.
The material of the chronological table is used with the express consent of Georg Bussmann (former head of the Kunstverein Frankfurt).

The visual component of the installation consists of a projection of video films - close-up views of the ruins of the premises of the Nuremberg Party Congress (an important background for National Socialism's suggestive total staging; Dome of Light: Albert Speer, Triumph of the Will: Leni Riefenstahl) as well as a survey of the concentration camp Buchenwald

* From the epilogue to: The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui/ Bert Brecht

MAG3, SCHIFFAMTSGASSE 17, A 1020 VIENNA/ AUSTRIA/ EUROPE
(ERREICHBAR ÜBER U2 TABORSTRASSE ODER U4 SCHOTTENRING/ AUSGANG U2 HERMINENGASSE)