The Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen is showing the first monographic museum exhibition of the actor and artist Lars Eidinger (*1976) at K21. Since 30 August 2024, the exhibition ‘O Mensch’ presents a selection of photographs and videos taken between 2018 and 2024 (with a few exceptions dating back to 2006). The pictures, mostly taken on the road with a smartphone or SLR camera, convey the much-travelled actor’s view of the world. Whether at guest performance or film locations such as London, Paris, Beijing, Tokyo, Sydney, Seoul, New York or in his home city of Berlin – Eidinger directs his gaze to remote, inconspicuous details and magnifies them. Supposedly insignificant situations are captured both tenderly and mercilessly in all their contradictions.
Image above: Lars Eidinger, Montreux, 2019, C-Print, © Courtesy Lars Eidinger und Ruttkowski; 68, Köln, Düsseldorf, Paris, New York
The exhibition, realised in close collaboration with Lars Eidinger, is a kaleidoscope of the present. From the multitude of images, the theme that emerges is everyday life in city centres around the world, characterised by promises of happiness and dreariness. The photos show bizarre architectural sins, absurd pathways and often senseless, misanthropically designed street furniture. Trees and bushes are hemmed in by fences, railings and kerbs. ‘O Man’ – the exhibition title evokes the existential dimension of the photographs and videos with a famous poem by Friedrich Nietzsche. Eidinger’s art draws its disarming and often corrosive humour from the undermining of pathos assertions through laconic casualness in both photography and drama. At the centre of the ‘symbolic images of an exhausted time’ – as Simon Strauß described Lars Eidinger’s 2019 photographs – is the human being. Many of the photos and videos show people, usually isolated, from behind or from the side, in a ‘lost profile’. The images are neither staged nor authorised.
The domestication of nature, homelessness and poverty in cities are unmistakable subjects; the photos often depict people doing rather precarious jobs. For example, the man in the Mickey Mouse costume (Montreux, 2019, video) resting in the evening sun on the shore of Lake Geneva (Montreux, 2019, C-print).
Or the human advertising medium on a traffic island covered with posters of special offers (Cleveland, 2021, video). The black-hooded man sitting on a shopping trolley and removing drawing pins from a tree trunk (Berkeley, 2018, C-print). The flower seller in a flowered skirt, almost visually absorbed in her floral assortment (Berlin, 2018, C-print). Eidinger’s radically descriptive stance is both distanced and empathetic. The world is shown as it is.
A number of videos are based on observations of sales or advertising performances in public spaces. Unhoused and as if they have fallen out of the world, the figures are reminiscent of performers, the locations appear as stages.
A woman stands on the edge of a square in front of the Ministry of Justice (Paris, 2021, video), a man observes the traffic on Berlin’s Avus motorway (Berlin, 2015, video), and a man in a transformer costume presents himself as a human machine in front of the Knie circus (Geneva, 2015, video). The videos are each shot in one take without panning and without a tripod. They are five to ten-minute plan sequences that demonstrate Eidinger’s keen sense of the relationship between figure and space. There is no editing or post-production. The instant character and immediacy of the video camera characterised the beginnings of video and performance art. They come to the fore again in Eidinger’s work. However, the enormous digital acceleration allows a much faster direct path from recording to presentation.
Lars Eidinger initially published his photos on his Instagram channel, which he programmatically deleted at the beginning of 2022 with well-founded criticism of the supposed social media. For the first exhibition of his photographs at the Neuer Aachener Kunstverein in 2019, he had already pursued a conceptual approach in transferring the photos from social media to the traditional white cube, which has continued to develop stringently to this day. Subjective criteria are largely avoided in production and presentation, and Eidinger also dispenses with aestheticising tricks and gimmicks when taking photographs. There is no looking through the viewfinder to correct crooked lines; focus and focal length are determined by the algorithm of the digital mobile phone camera.
Holding the images of the world in front of your eyes with an outstretched arm – the parallel to Eidinger himself pointed out the parallel to Hamlet’s gaze at the skull.
The editing, output and processing of the formats and the hanging of the photos in strictly chronological rows also follow the rules of databases rather than content-related contexts or subjective design intentions. Formats, frames, technique, material, everything is open and exposed in its objectivity so that the pictures can unfold their effect. In many cases, it is a look behind the backdrop of illusion. Even the titles merely indicate the location, such as ‘Paris, 2021’, where the photo was taken.
The exhibition at K21 shows around 100 photographs, 12 videos and an early Super8 film by Lars Eidinger. There are also some sculptural found objects (objets trouvés). In the central exhibition room, a so-called skydancer, an advertising object for the outdoor space with tubular limbs filled with air, will slapstick-like caricature human movement. In the two adjoining exhibition rooms on the Bel Etage, a text layer realised especially for the exhibition complements the works on display. These are short poems in the form of Japanese haiku by the multi-award-winning Japanese poet Yoko Tawada (*1960), who lives in Berlin. For Eidinger’s photo publication ‘O Mensch’ (2023, Berlin, Hatje Cantz Verlag), she wrote haiku in German to accompany around 90 photos. A selection of haiku can be seen in the exhibition, handwritten by the poet herself next to the photos on the walls.
The haiku accompanying the photo of Mickey Mouse in Montreux, for example, shows how text and image reinforce each other in their openness, pointedness and simplicity:
‘Evening beach / Bear’s work is done / Who am I as a human being?’
Lars Eidinger was born in Berlin in 1976 and is one of the most important German actors of his generation. Since completing his acting studies at the HfS Ernst Busch in 1999, he has been a member of the Berliner Schaubühne ensemble. In addition to numerous national and international film and television productions, he also works as a DJ and visual artist. Exhibitions at the Neuer Aachener Kunstverein (2019), Hamburger Kunsthalle (2021, Gesellschaft class), Stadtgalerie Klagenfurt (2023), among others.
Publications: Lars Eidinger, Autistic Disco. Berlin 2019 (Hatje Cantz Verlag). With an
essay by Simon Strauß (German/English); Lars Eidinger, O Mensch. Berlin 2023 (Hatje Cantz publishing house). With poems by Yoko Tawada (German/English)
WHEN?
Programme
Sparda Day on the occasion of the exhibition Lars Eidinger. O Mensch
Sunday, 6 October 2024, K21, 11 am – 6 pm
Guided tours of the exhibition
Sundays / 4 – 5 pm
Fee: 3 €, registration required
and on the KPMG art evenings
Free admission, registration on site
Gallery Talk in English
Guided tour of the exhibition in English
Wednesday / 6 November / 7 – 8 pm
Free admission as part of the KPMG Art Evening, registration on site
Guided tours for families
Experience art in the exhibition and museum workshop
19.10. Totally normal
16.11. The art of the snapshot
21.12. Heroes of the street
Every 3rd Saturday of the month / 3 – 4.30 pm
Free admission, registration required
Exhibition period: Saturday, 31.08.2024 – Sunday, 26.01.2025
WHERE?
K21
Ständehausstraße 1
40217 Düsseldorf
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