Beate Geissler & Oliver Sann
Personal Kill
14.03. – 02.05.2010

With the exhibition “Personal Kill” by Beate Geissler and Oliver Sann, the Kunstverein Bremerhaven presents a contemporary position with a strong political reference to the present. The artists Beate Geissler and Oliver Sann have collected video and photographic material over many years of work in restricted military areas, which they are presenting for the first time in Germany following exhibitions in South Africa, Russia and the United States.
Against the backdrop of these photographic and video works, the artists have put together a site-specific installation that refers both to the exhibition space and indirectly to the location of Bremerhaven. Alluding to the military training grounds, a spatially complex situation is created with barriers that both obstruct the view and enclose the viewer, creating ambiguous transitions between protection, threat and annexation.
The sparse modernist exhibition space of the Kunsthalle with its clinical-technical attributes (showcases, air shafts, etc.) now itself appears as a militarized building. The installation by Geissler and Sann also focuses on Bremerhaven as a port of embarkation for the American armed forces (Elvis Presley set foot on German soil here to complete his military service in Germany).
Personal Kill” is also about the continuity of military bases, which have had a decisive influence on the life of numerous German cities, including Bremerhaven.
Military training areas are places that prepare for international wars. As in other works (such as the series “The Real Estate”, which deals with foreclosed residential buildings in connection with the mortgage crisis), the artists concentrate on making globalization concrete on a small scale. However, this unfolds a context that encompasses the history of the military training areas as well as that of the city of Bremerhaven, the history of the Middle East and that of North America.
In military psychology, the term “personal kill” refers to the situation of direct contact with the enemy, in which the killing of an enemy is experienced directly. It is precisely this situation that leads to the greatest traumatization among soldiers. By making the indirect presence of war the subject of computer games and propaganda, Geissler and Sann allude to this traumatic emergency. The cynical motto of PEOSTRI (U.S. Army Program Executive Office for Simulation, Training and Instrumentation), a subdivision of the Pentagon, thus also becomes - critically turned - a central theme of the exhibition: “All but war is simulation”. Beyond begins the trauma.

Text: Johann Hartle

Curated by Klaus Becké.