Oral Programme / Session II - Kauno Bienalė

Oral Programme / Session II

2017-10-11

Horst Hoheisel and Andreas Knitz presentation and discussion with Dr. Rasa Antanavičiūtė (45 min.)

Jochen Gerz presentation and discussion with Manca Bajec (Royal College of Art and Design) (45 min.)

Discussion: Jochen Gerz, Horst Hoheisel and James E. Young, moderated by Dr. Rasa Antanavičiūtė and Manca Bajec (1 h.)

Horst Hoheisel and Andreas Knitz are the artists behind such projects as A Memorial to a Memorial (1995) in Buchenwald and Moving Monuments or the Monument of the Grey Buses in Ravensburg, Weissenau, Berlin and other cities (2006-2017). It was their proposal to demolish the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe competition, and they projected onto it the famous phrase “Arbeit macht frei” from the entrance gate to the Auschwitz concentration camp in commemoration of the camp’s liberation (1997). Since the 1990s Hoheisel and Knitz have been creating radical monuments and commemoration projects, more than 40 of which have been realised in different countries around the world.

Artist Jochen Gerz became famous in 1986 when he and Esther Shalev-Gerz created a monument against fascism in Hamburg-Harburg (Germany), which became the set example for new forms of monuments. Since then he has realised more than thirty commemorative projects in public spaces. Most of them, such as the 2146 Stones – Monument Against Racism in Saarbrücken (1993), are based on the principle of participation and, above all, seek to create monuments in our imagination.