The Surrogate
‘The Surrogate’ takes place at a site of an iconic building that was once demolished and rebuilt again years later: The Barcelona Pavilion by Mies van der Rohe.
The Barcelona Pavilion has become a kind of temple for modernist architecture, as well as the newly established relationship between modern architecture and sculpture (as presented together with the Georg Kolbe statue).
The film focuses on the relationship between technology and nature…
Atara
Atara is a 1970s styled sci-fi film set to contemporary Opera music. The score is based on the opera Tristan and Isolde by Richard Wagner together with original music by Boris Bojadzhiev.
Shot on location in Berlin, it tell the story of two buildings that used to stand at the same place: the Berliner Stadtschloss and the Palast der Republik.
The video follows a ceremony that takes place in the palace during a moment when one building is being resurrected and another building is transcending into a ghost…
Love Child
Love Child is a project using new DNA visualization technology with 3D scanning and combined with large-scale 3D printing. The project is a collaboration with Prof. Mark D. Shriver, Professor of Anthropology and Genetics at Penn State University, and Dr. Peter Claes from the Medical Imaging Research Center at KU Leuven. In the past Years, Prof. Shriver and Prof. Claes have developed a new technology with which the A person’s facial features based on the extraction of data from raw DNA can be visualized.
The technology is developed primarily for forensic science, but in this case The artist goes one step further with this project and combines the DNA of two different people to project…
From the End to the Beginning
The video From the End to the Beginning, is based on a music performance by the same name. The starting point for Amir Fattal’s music performance ‘From the End to the Beginning’ was to play Richard Wagner’s ‘Liebestod’ sequence in reverse order. By copying the last note as the first note and proceeding in this way, a new ‘mirrored’ musical piece was formed as an arrangement for nine instruments.
‘Liebestod’ is the final and dramatic aria from Wagner’s opera ‘Tristan und Isolde’, sung by Isolde after Tristan’s ….
German Village
German Village is named after a military experiment that took place in the US that year. The work combines two facets of the architect Erich Mendelsohn: creation and destruction within the context of Berlin. Two metal plates, one hanging above the other: one shows an aerial image of three buildings, the other a single colour.
The images, taken from the American army archive, are part of a 1943 experiment for which Mendelsohn, then in America, had an advisory role. Using his experience as an architect in Berlin, the American army constructed…
Mesopotopography
In his earlier works Amir Fattal consistently developed a language of objects, based on a minimalist aesthetic, that employed neo-industrial strategies of repetition, compression, reversal and estrangement to transcend the presiding dogma of ‘non-specificity’ by highlighting present events and attitudes in reference to historical images or narratives. Both as silent witnesses and repositories of memory, Fattal appropriated, and adapted, chosen examples of previous art, architecture, photography or music as disruptive ‘objects’ in order to create an aesthetic unease out of which patterns of behaviour or archetypical responses may be…
Terrain
German In his exhibition, Mesopotography, Fattal has broadened the geographical and conceptual focus of his work to include the systematic cycles of destruction of historical and religious monuments that have characterised warfare in the Middle East, Afghanistan and North Africa over the past twenty years. The propensity for iconophobia and iconoclasm (as well as for their opposite, iconolatry) has been present in the three monotheistic religions (Christianity, Islam and Judaism) since their inception and has recurred periodically throughout their histories as part of a broader ….
Shadow of Smoke Rings on the Wall
The installation is a closed dark room where two models are installed opposite to one another and transmitting text through light base Morse code. The first model is based on a Bauhaus building in Tel Aviv that was build in 1936 and is also called ‘the boat building’ as a reference to its boat-like shape. The building is set on top of a cliff-like structure that resemble an isolated desert mountain.
In the window of the top building there is a single white LED lamp that is transmitting a text taken out of Theodor Herzl’s utopian novel from 1902 called Altneland. Theodor Herzl is the founder…
Live Feed
‘Live Feed’ is based on a Polaroid photograph that I took in NYC in 2000. In the picture one can see people sitting on the grass on a nice summer day in the newly open West Village piers and in the far background the WTC towers. The Polaroid is installed in the exhibition in front of a video camera. The camera is zooming on the small section of the photo showing the towers and projecting it through a video projector on a screen in the front of the exhibition, so the viewer first sees the projection of the towers. The installation works on the notion that a Polaroid is a direct….
Tomorrow Gets Me Higher
Fattal’s sculptural works incorporate vintage objects culled from Berlin flea markets that make reference to themes as varied as personal nostalgia, political history, notions of gender roles and degrees of erotica. Placed in vitrines atop elegantly modern pedestals, their shapes reflected infinitely within the vitrines’ mirrored walls, these objects assume another layer of significance and are elevated from mundane personal effects to the realm of historical artifacts. Fattal’s use of lighting fixtures from the 60’s and 70’s, acquired from East…
The Last time you Fell
The debate between the conservation of the Palast der Republik and the rebuilding of the Stadtschloss, brings up both the genuine memories of the people who lived in the DDR time and the people who would like to look further back into the past to a pre-WWII era. It is also a political struggle about the representation of the new face of the reunited Berlin and a manifestation of it’s newly found cosmopolitical identity.
The piece “The last time you fell, who was there to catch you” combines two ready-made elements that are taken form these two historical building. One is a chandelier that used to be in the Palast der Republik, which no longer exist and the other is