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Produzenten Gallery Hamburg

 

Produzenten Gallery Hamburg
Potsdamer Straße 81b
10785 Berlin
Tel. 0049 (0) 30 20215465
www.ph-projects.com

 

 

During October 2011 they showed Olaf Metzel, "OPEN LETTER". It is written with the connotation of not being a private, but a public one, and this by someone who ventured into what followed the Arabic Springs. Today everyone knows that the war in Libya ended with Gaddafi having been found, but who ended up finally dead. By bringing associations closer to news being crumbled up like newspapers once they have been read and replaced the next day by new ones with other news, Olaf Metzel creates an invisible link to how a landscape looks like after the bombardment. All the twisted steel beams or wires dangling off roofs full of holes to see through into the sky above, that can be taken as a kind of artistic statement to be taken as expression of a new kind of 'polit-art'.

 

Olaf Metzel, Gaddafi 2011

 

There is unease, pain in the air, when seeing Gaddafi crumbled up like one does after having read a newspaper and ready to use it to clean windows or just to throw it away. The unease is about the Western world being unable to halt the escalation of violence until Nato had to enforce a no fly zone over Libya, but that was not all. The ground work to prepare the overthrow Gaddafi by force followed the peaceful transitions in first Tunesia, then in Egypt. Images of peaceful demonstrators questioning those who had been in power over thirty years is a powerful message in the West yet equally feared. Translated into such an art form, one can ask of course if this is a polit message of a new kind, especially when one knows how Gaddafi ended. It reminded very much of Saddam Hussein but the latter was not killed on the spot but was first tried and then executed as the death penalty would be enforced whenever someone does not show full compliance and readiness to cooperate with the West. That standpoint needs to be tested by means of the arts. The question is, therefore, what message such an art work gives, if not a pieceful  way of merely crumbling up the newspaper once no longer actual. Real time moves on faster than often the blink of the eye can tell as to what else lies ahead in such a fast moving, equally practical resolute world once determined to no longer accept such a kind of benevolent dictatorship as was the one exercised by Gaddafi.

 

 

 

 

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