Exhibition

MONSTERS_Men, Murderers, Mighty Machines


Katarzyna Kozyra, The Midget Gallery, 2006

Opening: Wednesday, November 5th 2008, at 8 p.m.
>> Movie and live-sound recording: Der müde Tod,
Wednesday, January 14 2009, 8 p.m.
>> Photos of the opening
>> Pictures of the exhibition
>> MONSTERS_Men, Murderers, Mighty Machines Newspaper in german language (pdf)
>> Text MONSTERS_Men, Murderers, Mighty Machines

Participating Artists:
bankleer (Karin Kasböck und Christoph Leitner), Berlin, Germany | Beobachter der Bediener von Maschinen (Olaf Arndt, Janneke Schönenbach), Berlin, Germany | Farida Heuck, Berlin, Germany | Rafal Jakubowicz, Poznan, Poland | Šejla Kameric, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina | Katarzyna Kozyra, Warsaw, Poland | Martin Krenn, Vienna, Austria | Kurt & Plasto, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina | Rupprecht Matthies, Hamburg, Germany | Personal Cinema, Athens, Greece | Tadej Pogacar, Ljubljana, Slovenia | Joanna Rajkowska, Warsaw, Poland | Rebond pour La Commune, Paris, France | Rimini Protokoll, Berlin, Germany | San Donato (Oleg Blyablyas, Alexey Chebykin, Evgeny Umansky), Kaliningrad, Russia | Janek Simon, Warsaw, Poland | Evgeny Umansky, Kaliningrad, Russia | Martin Zet, Libusin, Czech Republic
and partnership with students of vocational schools (SEBIT)

“monstra sunt in genere humano”
(“Monsters are part of the human race”, St. Augustine)
Monsters have haunted our imagination for as long as we can remember. Thanks to the Enlightenment, rationalism, and scientification neither fictional nor “real” monsters send much of a shiver down our spines any longer, whether these are ogres or people with physical deformities. Yet aestheticised forms such as horror, vampire, or splatter films are proof that monsters have never stopped fascinating us. While certain manifestations of this fascination may disappear it will always resurface in new forms. There are many monsters in existence today, even if they are not always known by that name. The concept of the monster, with all its variations on monstrousness, has almost become arbitrary; it is inevitably applied where social exclusion is promoted, where access is denied, where lines are drawn, or in extreme cases of segregation. People create their own identity through constructing this “other”, this thing “no-longer-human”. Monsters are counter-images of humans and human relationships. Humans cannot conceive of themselves without monsters, because these counter-images are like photographic negatives that reveal something significant about our own self-understanding – what it means to be human. The monster thus marks the boundaries of the human, and investigation of the subject can therefore be highly contentious and also compelling. The figure of the monster allows us to understand human rights as a political and cultural achievement of European bourgeois modernism, emerging from the distinction made between the human and the non-human. The concern here is not to attach labels through the explicit use of “monster” as a concept; the key point is to identify and recognise the functions of existing “monsters” which take the form of virtual mechanisms of extreme exclusion and delineation.

Duration: 6.11.2008 - 17.1.2008
Opening hours: TUE - FR, 4 p.m. - 8 p.m., SA, 2 p.m. - 6 p.m.
Address: Motorenhalle, Wachsbleichstraße 4a, 01067 Dresden, Germany

Further information: www.motorenhalle.de