Catalogue > At random

The video Berlin-Lichtenberg uses footage from a home movie filmed in 1943. The apparent intention of the filmmaker – to capture peaceful moments of family life such as a wife and child on a walk or leisure time at a lakeside restaurant in the Berlin district of Lichtenberg – is disrupted by unintended visual content. In the background, everyday life in the forced labour system becomes visible: a group of female forced labourers on the way to their work site, and the barracks of a forced labour camp behind the excursion venue. These visual elements are not consciously chosen, but rather a casual documentation of the omnipresence of forced labour in Nazi Germany. The amateur footage has been re-edited for the video with intertitles that contextualise the silent images and add a fictional level.

In his artistic work, Franz Wanner (*1975 in Bad Tölz, Germany, lives in Zurich) addresses topics such as the European Union’s migration policy, the German secret service and the arms industry, as well as their history and current structures, and the effects of Nazism on the German imperative of prosperity. “In a conceptual practice whose consistency of research and artistic output, in the tradition of Hans Haacke, continues – by means of investigations and transmedia – to ask questions where no one has yet done so” (Nora Sternfeld, HFBK Hamburg), “he creates images of a collective cognitive dissonance and analytical poetry about the pathology of overlooking within the Germany of today and its idioms” (Stephanie Weber, Lenbachhaus Munich). As Artist in Residence at the Harun Farocki Institute, he developed the exhibition Mind the Memory Gap for the KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art in Berlin. Under the title Eingestellte Gegenwarten, he realised his first solo exhibition in Italy at Merano Arte, which will be shown in modified form at the Lenbachhaus in Munich in 2026.