Guilty Landscapes

Dries Verhoeven

Episode I

Poverty, exploitation, and turmoil … images we think we know, images with which we are confronted every day when the world’s crises flicker accusingly on every screen. But how are we supposed to look away when the people behind the news suddenly look us directly and personally in the eye?
The Berlin-based Dutch artist Dries Verhoeven is well-known for creating provocative spectacles. It is not unusual for his works to end in scandal, for example when he exhibits people in glass cases or tempts unknowing subjects into the public eye using a dating app.
‘Guilty Landscapes’ is no less disturbing – while at the same time quiet, concentrated, intimate. Without pulling its political punches, it is Verhoeven’s most poetic and most touching work so far.
We enter a foreign world, as familiar as it may now seem.
But no matter how innocent, how personal and how real this virtual encounter appears, it is equally burdened, contaminated with feelings of guilt and accusation. The colonial past and turbocapitalist present divide us more than the screen between us. And yet it is only a small step from the so-called third to the presumed first world. Our positions are relative and suddenly uncertain. What is the ground we are standing on? How are we connected to each other? Where does the feeling of familiarity come from when we will never meet?
‘Guilty Landscapes’ shakes up what we deduce from images and demands instead that we achieve the paradoxical combination of permanently questioning the basis of our decisions while at the same time making our own positions clear.

ON

Live-Installation
Duration 10’
Admission on the hour and at half past, respectively. Last admission 30 minutes before closing.
Tickets are valid for the predetermined admission time.
Please be at the venue on time.

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