Walhalla to Birkenau

Against the backdrop of a global pandemic and a war in Ukraine, Kunsthalle Osnabrück sets out to explore the question: What’s the current state of our hope and desire for love, identity and belonging? This year’s theme “Romanticism” uses the eponymous art and literature movement as a distorting mirror with which to examine the current state of society. Sweeping across Germany and Europe, hardly any other movement has managed to shape such a strong collective feeling situated between departure, nostalgia and nationalism through aesthetic means. Set against the backdrop that is the museum’s medieval architecture, the Kunsthalle wants to investigate whether the current sense of global turmoil has inspired a comeback of the visual and linguistic worlds of Romanticism. The exhibition programme of the annual theme includes solo exhibitions by the Forum Democratic Culture and Contemporary Art, Anna Haifisch, Gabriella Hirst, Irène Mélix, Cemile Sahin, Andrzej Steinbach, Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings. As part of their artistic practice, the Forum Democratic Culture and Contemporary Art (Forum DCCA) employs a method of cultural critique to focus on the cultural continuities of racism and antisemitism. Building on from their examination of different waves of Romanticism and ethno-nationalist ideas in the Völkisch movement, the Forum DCCA presents two new video works in the installational setting of a ruin. Exploring the political and cultural impact and reciprocal nature of Romanticism and antisemitism as well as a continued rejection of modernity up until the present day, the filmswork with two deliberately contrasting narratives. The first film was shot in three locations that are exemplary in their mystification of the so-called “cultural nation” of Germany and its ties to German Romanticism – Valhalla in the Danube Valley, the Ruinentheater (ruin theatre) in Bayreuth and Pfaueninsel (peacock island) in Berlin. These shots are juxtaposed with recurring imagery of Romanticism taken from the computer game Elden Ring or references to the anti-Semitic play “MasKomYa” by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. This is in contrast to the second film, which shows footage from the grounds of the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial site, representing one of the physical consequences of German Romanticism, which was integral in shaping the identity of the Nazis. The exhibition will be complemented by a panel discussion on 15 October 2022 sponsored by the Federal Agency for Civic Education (Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung). The Forum Democratic Culture and Contemporary Art (DE) is run by artists Fabian Bechtle and Leon Kahane. It was founded in 2018 as a project of the Amadeu Antonio Foundation (Amadeu Antonio Stiftung). Most recently, the Forum DCCA launched the series “Continuities of Antisemitism” (Kontinuitäten des Antisemitismus) at Volksbühne Berlin (2020/21), collaborated with Hito Steyerl for their exhibition at Kunstsammlung NordrheinWestfalen, K21 and developed a piece called “Anti-modern Continuities” (Antimoderne Kontinuitäten) for Weserburg Museum für Moderne Kunst Bremen (both in 2020). The exhibition at Kunsthalle Osnabrück will be the first institutional solo exhibition of the Forum DCCA.