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Artists to Resurrect Berlin Wall for Epic Film-Art Installation
More details have been released of the Berlin Wall set to be ‘rebuilt’ as part of an epic film-art installation set in the German capital, which looks to trigger debate around issues of surveillance, co-existence and nationalism. Led by Russian filmmaker Ilya Khrzhanovsky, the experience will seek to create a ‘city within a city’ – it will include the premiere of Khrzhanovsky’s mysterious DAU film project, and has also signed up performance icon Marina Abramović, street artist Banksy and the band Massive Attack to take part.
Organizers say that if they are granted the final go-ahead from local authorities, they will install 900 concrete slabs in the city’s central Unter den Linden boulevard to create the immersive environment. Complete with its own entrance ‘visas’, the time-capsule installation will open on 12 October, and then be symbolically torn down on 9 November – marking the anniversary of the Wall’s fall in 1989.
The temporary resurrection of the Berlin Wall will be hosted by arts festival Berliner Festspiele. Although organizers have variously described the project as ‘a special experiential space’, a ‘historical echo chamber’, and ‘the impression of a journey in a foreign country’, they have been keen to stress that they are aware of its sensitivity. Festival director Thomas Oberender said that the experience would not be ‘a Disney GDR’ but instead ‘a mixture of social experiment, artistic experiment and […] an impressive form of world-building.’
Nevertheless, the project is not without its detractors, who have called it out as disrespectful. Green party politician Sabina Bangert told Tagesspiegel Daily: ‘Out of respect for the victims who really experienced such situations, we should step away from this.’ However the country’s minister of culture Monika Gruetters has said that she is ‘absolutely convinced this will be a world event’.Khrzhanovsky has gained a cultish following for his mysterious DAU project (2005–ongoing), the bulk of which was recorded on a specially made set in the city of Kharkov, Ukraine between 2009 and 20011. The filmmaker recreated a Stalinist society, with participants spending two years in an artificial city – 14 children are said to have been conceived on set, which was eventually destroyed by neo-Nazis hired by the director. Hundreds of hours of footage were collected, but it has not yet been screened – the results are set to be shown for the first time as part of the Berlin installation. You can view the trailer here.
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Published on August 29 on Twitter:
Brian Eno
Russia film-maker Ilya Khrzhanovsky teams up with Brian Eno, Marina Abramovic and Massive Attack for a project called DAU https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/berlin-to-get-replica-wall-with-visa-controls-in-giant-art-installation-on-soviet-era …
Berlin to get replica wall with visa controls in giant art installation on Soviet era Russia film-maker Ilya Khrzhanovsky teams up with Brian Eno, Marina Abramovic, Massive Attack for project called DAU
28th August 2018 13:48 GMT
The centre of Berlin, already a vast building site, will soon host a new construction that few would want to see back for good. The Russian-born film-maker and artist Ilya Khrzhanovsky and the Berliner Festspiele are resurrecting the Berlin Wall.
For four weeks this autumn, visitors to a pocket of central Berlin will need to buy a visa and pass through controls in order to enter an enclosed pedestrianised zone surrounded by a replica of the Berlin Wall—29 years after the original wall fell. The organisers promise “a special experiential space” and “historical echo chambers” in an area flanked by the State Opera House, Bertelsmann’s headquarters, Unter den Linden and a canal.
Visitors will be required to exchange their mobile phones for a special device that will give an “individually tailored journey” through the enclosed zone, which will be open 24 hours a day, a statement from Berliner Festspiele says. Normal life will continue inside, though streets, lamps and signposts will “give the impression of a journey in a foreign country.”
Working with prominent partners such as Brian Eno, Marina Abramovic and Massive Attack, Khrzhanovsky and his team have produced 13 feature films and a number of film series from more than 700 hours of film shot over three years. These films will be shown in Berlin, under the title Freedom, “as an encounter with another reality created by a giant installation” from 12 October. Performances with Abramovic and Carsten Höller as well as concerts with the Greek-Russian composer Teodor Currentzis will be offered on an individual basis via the special device to guests. The replica of the wall will be destroyed “in spectacular style” at the end of the work on November 9, the 29th anniversary of the fall of the original.
After Berlin, the films will be screened in Paris as Fraternity from 23 November and in London as Equality in 2019. They are the result of an experiment that began in 2009, when 400 people, described as simple street-sweepers, waitresses, families, famous artists and Nobel prize-winners, travelled back in time to the Soviet Union and lived isolated from the modern world for two years at “The Institute,” Khrzhanovsky’s secret space in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv.
Freedom will be show in Berlin from 12 October
Their journey crossed three decades of Soviet history and ended in 1968—or 2011, in real time. None of the films produced from this experience was scripted, but life in the Institute was turned into film, the press statement explains.
The project in all three cities is supported by the London-based Phenomen Trust, founded by the Russian businessman Serguei Adoniev.
More in this video:
GRANDEST FILM EXPERIMENT: DAU Ilya Khrzhanovsky
Alina Simone reports on the secretive film production DAU for PRI Worldwide. In July of 2011, my dad, Alexander Vilenkin, called me. He said he was returning to Kharkov, Ukraine, the city my family left as political refugees almost 40 years ago, and he was leaving in two days. And that wasn’t even the weird part. He was going back in time, to a country that no longer exists, to play a role in what might just be the grandest experiment in film history. The film, Dau, is Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s epic biopic about the Nobel-prize winning Soviet physicist, Lev Landau. It may be the strangest, most ambitious movie you’ve never seen. It was filmed for five continuous years in a built-to-scale working model of a 1950s Soviet scientific institute... The Institute is the brainchild of the 37-year-old enfant terrible director, Ilya Khrzhanovsky, an unruly-mopped, bespectacled, anarchic and flamboyantly imperious scion of a film family, who has so far managed to convince enough European investors to bankroll his brutal and baroque movie project/human experiment that has been in the making since 2006.
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