King Kong, 2001

video installation

King Kong (2001) is a multi-layered video installation contemplating the King Kong narrative. Staged as a music video of sorts, the work is situated in Sophiatown in Johannesburg, an important place within South Africa’s Apartheid history, and also the location for the jazz musical King Kong (1959) based on the story of heavyweight boxing icon, Ezekiel “King Kong” Dhlamini. It is in Sophiatown where singersongwriter Daniel Johnston recites his own King Kong song, a retelling of the legendary King Kong film, while children around him play and listen.

Peter Friedl, King Kong, 2001, Single-channel video installation, color, sound, 3:57 min., aspect ratio 4:3, loop, Edition of 3 + 1AP, videostill

Single-channel video installation, color, sound
3:57 min., aspect ratio 4:3, loop
Edition of 3 + 1AP

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Peter Friedl

**Everyone is a conspiracy theorist, 2023**

**The Dramatist (Anne, Blind Boy, Koba), 2016**

**The Dramatist (Black Hamlet, Crazy Henry, Giulia, Toussaint), 2013**

Biography

Peter Friedl is a classic of contemporary art. The three-time documenta participant, born in 1960, can be considered a notorious participant in discourse - because his work has always understood how to address major themes in such a way that they found and find new forms away from the canon and mainstream. Forms that run counter to power and domination, subvert them, escape them.... and confront them in the process. Friedl takes away from history - for example colonialism or modernity, its paradigms and institutions - the power to define what is connected and how, and with an almost innocent-seeming aesthetic he tells a different story about humans and historical actions than we are used to and may find opportune. Peter Friedl provokes that which dominates us, including our own thinking. Throughout the years he his work has been displayed in meaningful solo exhibitions, most recently Teatro Popular (KOW Berlin, 2023), Report 1964-2022 (KW Berlin 2022) and No Prey, No Pay (Guido Costa Projects Turin, 2021) and major group exhibitions such as Life, Without Buildings, Gta exhibitions (ETH Zurich 2022), Das Auto rosi aber (KOW Berlin 2022) and Komunikazion - Inkomunikazio (Tabakalera, Centre for Contemporary Art, San Sebastian 2021).

Full Biography

Exhibitions at KOW