The School of No Return by Ulf Aminde

The work of the Berlin based artist, Ulf Aminde takes place in a border area of performance, video and post dramatic theater. He describes his practice as performative film and so he is constantly mixing up film documentary techniques with fiction based claims, critique of representation with strategies of self empowerment or staged with spontaneous scenes. He often works with so called marginalized groups in society, such as the homeless, addicts, psychiatric inpatients, street musicians and also his family and relatives, customers at Ikea or operasingers in Taiwan. In Huis Huguetan we will show an overview of his practice of the last decade, including a new piece created especially for this location.

In the works of Aminde, his desire to let his work becoming a ‘social machinery’ is very present, but he also always tries to critically examine his own position as an initiator and director. Film is for him a way to refresh relationships between individuals and to produce a foundation for a new understanding of realism. His works are sensitive towards consideration of power mechanism especially within his own productions, the politics of the image becomes a reflection as well as the circulation of it in the society of the spectacle. His projects bring together people with totally different social backgrounds, in which not only social divisions and hierarchies are exposed, but these also prove unstable. Transformation of repressed behavior and a shout out for social change are therefore central to his work and meanwhile the role and potential of art itself is questioned.

For Huis Huguetan, where until recently the Supreme Court was established, Aminde realised an installation that consists of an overview of works of the last ten years but also a new production questioning the former function of the building. In this video installation Sony Kutscher, a Sinti man, rehearses a dramatic reading of a story that he wrote down himself. It is the story of the lucky prevention of the deportation of his grandparents to Auschwitz in the 3rd Reich. At the former Gestapo prison in Berlin, Sony Kutscher developed the telling of a dramatic story while being filmed by Aminde who only intervenes to support the actor. The repetitive edit of the material, the pensive attitude of the camera and also the installation of this new work in the Huis Huguetan request the possibilities to deal with a traumatic past and family story. Because of the darkness attached to the narration but also the disparity of both — Sony Kutscher the actor and representer of a Sinti Family and Ulf Aminde the filmmaker — through the work, there is no easy resolution in sight. At least there is no forgiveness.

Ulf Aminde (1969, Stuttgart) has had solo exhibitions at, among other places, Venus & Appol, Düsseldorf; Heidelberger Kunstverein; Kunstverein Arnsberg, Volksbühne Berlin (theatre production); Kunstraum Munich; Kunstverein Wolfsburg, UKS Gallery, Oslo and Galerie Tanja Wagner, Berlin. He was also nominated for the Nam June Paik Award in 2014 and won the Autoren und Produzentenpreis Junges Theater Bremen in 2006.