173 | 2026

JANA NORITSCH

Bursting Open the Framework: Collective as Operative Structure

“The members of Clara Mosch wanted to create an intellectual and artistic climate in which they could live, and, namely, in the place where they had defiantly resolved to dwell . . .”¹

Clara Mosch* was the name that artists chose for a group established in Karl-Marx-Stadt (today Chemnitz in Saxony) in 1977, which managed to remain active until the end of 1982. Its name is an acro­nym consisting of the first letters of the surnames of the founding members of the group: Carlfriedrich CLAus (1930–1998), Thomas RAnft (b. 1945) and Dagmar Ranft-Schinke (b. 1944), Michael MOrg­ner (b. 1942), and Gregor-Torsten SCHade (b. 1948; since 1980: Kozik). Associate members of the group included not only Manfred Butzmann (b. 1942), who came to all of the Pleinairs,² or Wolfgang E. Biedermann (1940–2008), but also the photo artist Ralf-Rainer Wasse (1942–2017). Wasse’s photographic work fulfilled two functions, whereby the second one first became apparent only when the files of the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (MfS, Ministry for State Security, aka Stasi) were opened up after the fall of the Berlin Wall: On the one hand, he produced excellent photographs as photo­montages or collages, which circulated as Mail Art in the alternative art scene of the German Democratic Republic (GDR).³ On the other, Wasse sold his material to the Stasi, thus assisting the state in moni­toring the informal art scene and contributing to the Stasi’s perfidious “decomposition measures” (Zersetzungsmaßnahmen). Over ten thousand photographs were produced. The collection of negatives also represents a central body of sources without which the constellations and actions of the group would be difficult to reconstruct. This transmission thus bears witness to both friendship and betrayal. As was revealed after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the artist collective was monitored by the state from the very beginning: They were observed by over 120 unofficial employees of the Stasi. “That they took the group seriously! If we had known that the Stasi had 140 people monitoring us, we wouldn’t have been so brash,” Michael Morgner admits in the recent documentary film about Clara Mosch.

1 Jutta Penndorf, cited after Ulrich Clewing, “Bilder aus der Happening-Zone,” Kul­tur­stiftung der Länder, 2015, https://www.kulturstiftung.de/bilder-aus-der-happening-zone.

2 Translator’s note: These so-called Pleinair events were held in the tradition of the French Impressionists. In the second half of the twentieth century, artists would use these events in order to exchange ideas about experimental art forms outdoors in the countryside.

3 Text accompanying the exhibition Clara Mosch und Ralf-Rainer Wasse: Aktion und Fotografie (Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, February 23 – June 21, 2020), https://www.kunstsammlungen-chemnitz.de/wp-content/uploads/KSC_Clara_mosch_Flyer_6-seitig_Ansicht.pdf.

MARTIN HERBERT

Moving Target

Ayo Akingbade’s The Fist (2022) is a twenty-three-minute tour of the Guinness brewery in Ikeja, the state capital of Lagos in Nigeria. Shot on 35mm film and then transferred to HD video, the work unfolds calmly through sustained static shots and elegant cinematography doused in bluish light, and delivers a compressed working day. Here are workers (some wearing pandemic-era masks) clocking in and doing cleaning duties, security guards and employee briefings, the different stages of filtering and brewing the famous Irish stout, the clockwork-like bottle conveyors that evidently haven’t needed updating in many years, and stacked cases of Malta Guinness cans. Everything, it appears, is functioning the way it did the day before and the way it will tomorrow. As you watch, though, and try to decide what you’re watching or why the film was made, you’re pulled inwardly in multiple directions. Certain signifiers, maybe even leading off from the black and whi­te of the Guinness beer logo itself, might suggest that this film observing a European-originated business in Africa has something to do with colonialism. (The brewery, in fact, opened in 1962, two years after Nigeria achieved independence.) But The Fist, while set in a place that feels potentially loaded, doesn’t offer any editorializing cues in that direction. There’s no voiceover, the film is not a socio­-
political thesis, and it veers pointedly away from clichéd expectations of what a British-Nigerian artist-filmmaker might make films °“about”; it seems driven more by curiosity. The Fist—part artistic and part documentary in equal measure, highly watchable despite its workaday subject—takes you somewhere specific and shows you what it’s like to be there. It neither romanticizes nor critiques. If you’re familiar with some of Akingbade’s other films, this one might seem to be partly “about” how ad-hoc communities determined by place coexist, or—more meta—about dailiness, showing up and determinedly doing the work. Yet The Fist is also as much constituted by what it’s pointedly not giving you as what it does deliver, down to the ambiguous title. An open hand displays what, if anything, is in it. A fist can be read various ways, depending on context, but it’s always a hand closed tightly around itself.

RADEK KROLCZYK

Tor Pignattara I–VI

Tor Pignattara I

Along the embankment of the Tiber River at the old town, underneath the yellow-red leaves of the plane trees, someone is approaching me, looking for an answer. It is a haggard elderly man in gray-blue pants and a dark-blue anorak. He wants to know the name of this bridge. It is called Cavour. The man is carrying a paper bag displaying the three stripes of the Adidas brand, set in triangular form. Toward the edge, he has sketched fragments of a street map using a ballpoint pen. In one spot, a short line intersects with a long, curved one, and here he now writes “CAVOUR” in capital letters. He lifts up his right arm to draw a circle in the air, thus referencing the other side of the river. He says something happened there years ago, and now he is trying to reconstruct it.

Before I cross the busy riverside road, I gaze down toward the river once more. It is nestled in its concrete ravine, heavy as lead, in a state of stillness. The trunks of the plane trees have a hue that makes them seem as if they, too, were made of concrete. The colorful leaves on their equally concrete-gray branches seem out of place. There is a floating shack that is moored down at the quay, with metal rods that support a flat, wide pitched roof made of corrugated iron and wooden planks below. I walk a while on the other side of the riverside road, through narrow, winding alleyways, past a group of Carabinieri, past the parliament building, to eventually arrive at Cine­ma Nuovo Olimpia.

In the fall of 2023, the film Nuovo Olimpo was released, now playing in this cinema here. The film is set in the 1970s; old black-and-white Italian movies are being shown, with gay men meeting in the restrooms for sex. This is how Pietro and Enea came together. Their love story ended in 2016, nearly forty years later. That fall, their story was shown on the screen of the cinema where it all began. The decades disengage and then reconnect, in this dimmed place, in this city where centuries disengage and reconnect.

JANA JOHANNA HAECKEL

Do-li-na—At the Margins of Visibility

The history of photography is inseparable from notions of light, sha­dow, and making visible. William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the numerous inventors of the medium, described the photograph as a “play of light and shade” that has left “its image or impression behind . . . [on] the paper.”¹ Photographic images correspondingly promise to transpose the world into a picture by means of light—or, in the sense of an impression, to inscribe a physical trace. This ostensible making-visible is, however, never a neutral act. Bringing something to light always also denotes bringing it out of the darkness, subjecting it to an order of seeing, and inscribing it in a conceptual context.

In this sense, the light of photography is not only a physical phenomenon, but also an epistemic category. It stands for processes of seeking evidence and truth, but, simultaneously, also for power relations, which are produced through visibility. As what is made visible can be named, classified, archived, and controlled, what lies in darkness defies categorical order as well as institutional appropriation. Photography has therefore operated from the very beginning in a field of tension between the promise of making visible and the power of ascription and argumentation.

With his ongoing project Do-li-na, the Italian photographer Davi­de Degano has been focusing on precisely this point since 2020. Rather than comprehending visibility as an unambiguous category, the artist interrogates the conditions under which something and/or someone is made visible—and concentrates in his work on those identity-forming moments and phenomena that put up resistance in the process of being portrayed. What is thus central to Do-li-na is the relationship between popular mythologies, identity, archive, and memory in Friuli-Venezia Giulia—a border region in which Italian, Friulian, Slovenian, and German cultures as well as languages come together.

1 William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (London: Longman, Brown,
Green and Longmans, 1844), e-book: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/33447/
33447-h/33447-h.html#toc4, n. p.

TACO HIDDE BAKKER

The Dutch “Gas Bubble” and its Aftermath

It’s a relatively cold winter day when I visit Tanja Engelberts in her studio in The Hague, considering that Dutch winters have tended to be relatively mild in recent years. The spacious room with high ceilings is situated in a prewar building formerly housing a school. This usually means bad insulation. Especially for my visit, Engelberts has turned the heating up a little higher, which, as in many older buildings, runs on natural gas. It’s hard to fathom nowadays in a small country like the Netherlands, but back in 1959, the then largest-known natural gas field was discovered near the hamlet of Kolham in the northeastern province of Groningen. From an estimated 2,740 billion cubic meters of natural gas in total, around 2,300 billion were extracted between 1963, the year production began, and 2024. Revenue from the gas field contributed to the expansion of the Dutch welfare state in the 1960s and 1970s.

Besides providing immense revenue, the Groningen “gas bubble” has fueled the heating of nearly every Dutch home over the past half century. Enormous investments have been made to readjust infrastructure to this fuel. And when infrastructure functions well, it grants us the luxury to forget about its existence, making it so easi­ly taken for granted. Until the infra (below) starts to malfunction or cause unforeseen side effects. Cracks begin to appear.

Engelberts’s focus is on the often invisible infrastructures support­ing the complex networks of our fossil-fueled society. She is fascinated not only by the architecture of the fossil fuel industry, but also by its sociology and the entanglements of landscape and ecology on the one hand and culture and industry on the other. Her practice hovers between journalism and conceptual modes. In an earlier project, for example, she bore witness to oil platforms in the North Sea, several of which she had visited, bringing along her camera and a notepad. One of the results of these visits is the meticulously laid-out book Forgotten Seas (The Eriskay Connection, 2023), a photographic exploration of the offshore oil and gas industry. Some of the platforms meanwhile have been “decommissioned.” In a marvelous, short video work called Decom (2021), Engelberts followed one such platform in its process of being dismantled, therefore also mounting a camera onto the claws of the demolition machine. The artist herself calls this video a “portrait.” Similar to her visual and written documentation of the offshore platforms, judgment about the ethics of the fossil-fuel complex is left to the viewer.