Born in 1965, trained as an architect, Julian Rosefeldt embraced the world of contemporary art by looking for traces of “human-ness” in every-day details. In his exhibition, Paris et Les Cathédrales Inconnues (1997), and with his accomplice, photographer Piero Steinle, he showed the public the beauty of forgotten empty spaces – warehouses, attics or water. Then there was the exhibition, News (1998), an analysis of the construction of real-ness and of iconographic grammar used in television newscasts, and in Global Soap (2000), he creates a sort of atlas of body language as seen in soap operas and in the gestures of the icons of this mediatised era. All this he compares with the power of expression in religious paintings over the centuries of art history. He has made several video films to go with Thomas Ostermeier's productions.
Bastion Europe
On the walls of some of the Festival venues and on one of the city gates, neon signs made up of enigmatic, playful and ironic phrases created by the artist Julian Rosefeldt, make the passer-by or the Festival visitor stop and think. Critical allusions to the speeches of US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld mentioning “old Europe”, a pacifist sent back during the second Iraq War, signposts in a city-cum-theatre which vacillates between being a powerful place of cultural independence and an inward-looking fortress. The writings in this installation conceived by Thomas Ostermeier cover tracks and, shift references in time and space. It's a wry view of the condition of the spectator.
Distribution
conception : Julian Rosefeldt
Production
production : Festival d'Avignon