Statement by Stéphane Bauer, Director, Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien

Or why Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien will continue to be a collecting point for the campaign “Deutschland schafft es ab” (Germany gets rid of it), a project by Martin Zet in the context of the 7th Berlin Biennale.

On request of the organizers of the Berlin Biennale, Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien agreed before the start of the campaign to collect dropped-off books and hand them over to the Berlin Biennale. Immediately after publishing our call and being indicated by the press as a location that accepts the books, we were met with both hostile but also enthusiastic and endorsing reactions. Regardless of fierce and polarizing criticism and protest that emerged from the public, Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien will continue to act as a collecting point.

In critical solidarity with the Berlin Biennale, Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien seeks to contribute something in order to allow for the active and productive continuation of the debates that the 7th Berlin Biennale has already initiated and those that will continue to arise.

Artur Żmijewski, who was selected and confirmed by the selection committee and the advisory board of the Berlin Biennale as the curator, aims at letting art interact with reality. He asks for the manipulative potential of artists and for an art which – instead of taking up a representing role – intervenes directly and effectively in order to performatively transform reality. (Cf. Interview with Artur Żmijewski by Joanna Warsza on the Berlin Biennale website)

With his radical and provocative institutional critique Artur Żmijewski will question familiar approaches and strategies, thus challenging not only the public but also the legitimizing structures of institutions and cultural centers. The projects he has invited will ask questions such as: what is Art allowed to do? where are the limits of artistic actions? when is “good taste” violated? what still counts as Art? and what are institutions allowed to permit and support…? Questions such as these carry with them the conceptual and practical broadening of the notion of art, and they have rarely been permitted in such a provocative way as Artur Żmijewski is currently pushing it.

It is important to us that such questions – and thus Art itself – are being negotiated. The negotiating process around Martin Zet’s campaign belongs to this discussion. It is a discussion that has to be carried out publicly – and one of its public spaces is Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien.

Even though we understand many of the concerns that were expressed against Martin Zet’s campaign we cannot understand the fierceness of this criticism nor the polemics against him.

Martin Zet does not call for a burning of books! However, he certainly intends that his campaign calls for such associations, revealing nearly reflex responses. In fact he merely wants to use the collected books to create an installation with the participation of the visitors of the Berlin Biennale. He has himself, along with many other artists, previously made and exhibited installations with books.

The particularity of his project arises from choosing Thilo Sarrazin’s book Deutschland schafft sich ab (Germany abolishes itself) and immanently evoking the potential elimination of Sarrazin’s ideas.

Martin Zet exposes the contradictory and hysteric helplessness with which the public has reacted to Thilo Sarrazin’s deeply racist utterances and theses or, for instance, to the existence and crimes of the so-called “Zwickau terrorist cell”: Unfortunately Germany is again and again caught up by its racist and right-wing past and therefore cannot simply “eliminate” its history. Already now Martin Zet’s campaign shows that this racism could fill a whole real space at the Berlin Biennale and that it repeatedly does fill and define the realm of society. The reactions and criticism in response to the project show that we still react with reflexes and are nearly panicking when someone acts with the concepts of “books”, “recycling” and “collecting”.

The news and reactions to Martin Zet are characterised by a virulence and directiness missing in the criticism of Thilo Sarrazin’s theses and other racist processes in Germany.

This is why we will continue to act as a collecting point. We are curious about how many copies will really be dropped off. One week into the campaign – and in spite of intense media coverage – we have so far received only a single book. Perhaps this is the most obvious proof that in practice this campaign does not work and that art encounters a dilemma as soon as it wants to interact with reality…

At the same time the debates that have already emerged and those that are still to come show us that it is important to make such discussions possible by supporting them… and that artistic actions at least do fill and open up a social space, which reveals helplessness, contradictions, hysteria and virulence… If nothing else it is up to the curator and his curators of the 7th Berlin Biennale to actively engage in this discussion pushing it and its quality. We are on board!

Berlin, January 17, 2012