Review
Künstlerhaus Stuttgart is currently presenting films by Harun Farocki as part of its broader engagement with "plug-in philosophy" and efforts to better interconnect political questions within the context of contemporary art.
Asking for the address of Künstlerhaus Stuttgart might yield better results abroad than within Stuttgart itself. Founded in 1978 as an initiative by visual artists and operating ever since under a self-organized structure, the institution has long been known as a site for interdisciplinary artistic experimentation, especially with new forms of production.
When Fareed Armaly took over as artistic director in 1999, he found not only the building in need of renovation. He also sought to revise the building's layout: from a sequence starting at the entrance, ascending through a staircase to digital studios on the first floor, exhibition spaces on the second, and artist studios on the third, culminating in haus.0 as the central programming unit. Armaly proposed a more horizontal structure—one that would accommodate "multiple possible versions of an institution's past alongside conceivable variants of its future."
This institutional rethinking is reflected in the launch of a new website, which describes the function of haus.0 by analogy to the principles of a web browser. The connective tissue among exhibitions, workshops, and other forms of artistic production and presentation lies in haus.0's "plug-in philosophy." From the beginning, Armaly's goal was to create an environment more capable of interfacing with contemporary art practices—those that address not only art itself, but also culture, society, and the politics of representation.
One example of exchange with other institutions is Revival Fields Part 1, a project by New York-based artist Mel Chin in collaboration with the University of Hohenheim. In a greenhouse designed by Chin, seeds of so-called "hyperaccumulator" plants—capable of extracting heavy metals from contaminated soil—are cultivated before being transplanted to a university test site.
Ruby Sicars' project AMP (Asiatic Mode of Production) posed two guiding questions: What is the cultural identity of second-generation Asians living abroad, who know their heritage primarily through the lens of their parents? And how do processes of "recolonization" manifest in selected products of contemporary Indian and Pakistani popular culture? The project focused in particular on changing representations of women in the subcontinent, often in a more positive direction.
Currently on view at Künstlerhaus is the exhibition Traces of Staging, including an "artist's space" dedicated to filmmaker Harun Farocki. At the opening, Viennese artist and curator Constanze Ruhm presented Farocki through a screening of his 1969 film Inextinguishable Fire and Jill Godmilow's 1998 remake What Farocki Taught. Godmilow was responding to the fact that Farocki's film—about napalm production by Dow Chemicals during the Vietnam War—had never been shown in the United States. Her remake (in color and in English) is an exact replica, produced through meticulous restaging. At once faithful and contemporary, it serves as a critical intervention.
Farocki's original black-and-white film is deliberately sober in tone, devoid of shocking "real" images. It relies on models: "There are no heroes or villains—not even real characters, only extras playing average types," as Godmilow puts it. With figures like these, any war can be enacted.
In Traces of Staging, Farocki's work is placed in the context of surveillance. His documentary-based film Prison Images (2000) is presented in a single-channel version. In one sequence, a fight breaks out between two inmates in the yard of a U.S. maximum-security prison. At the moment of attack, all the other prisoners lie flat on the ground; guards shout commands, then a gunshot rings out. One inmate lies dead. The film continues with training footage of the guards, mirroring the prior events. It leaves no doubt that the field of surveillance cameras overlaps precisely with the shooters' field of control. Films like this have increasingly had to make way for more commercially viable programming in theaters and on television. Künstlerhaus Stuttgart remains one of the few venues suited for such screenings—but who will see them there?
Dutch artist Wendelien van Oldenborgh, currently a resident at Künstlerhaus, explores power relations among women through the lens of surveillance. A double slide projection composed of video stills shows a female police officer conducting searches of women at the entrance to a soccer stadium—once in close-up, showing only her probing hands, and once from a greater distance. The filmmaker, by filming the police officer, becomes part of the surveillance apparatus herself.
Van Oldenborgh's approach intensifies the coded interplay of erotically charged power dynamics. Alongside this, documents related to Olaf Metzel's 1984 Stammheim installation introduce the museum as a third institutional context, alongside prison and football. Metzel had leaned a concrete wreath—evocative of traditional victory garlands—against the wall of the Württembergischer Kunstverein and painted the word "Stammheim" in white letters. Today, the graffiti has been partially painted over. For one representative of the responsible ministry, this "scribble" provided a convenient excuse to order the removal of Metzel's intervention—"not for ideological reasons," they claimed, "but because the building is scheduled for renovation."