The Dramatist (Black Hamlet, Crazy Henry, Giulia, Toussaint) (2013) embodies the figures of Toussaint Louverture, the multi-faceted leader of the Haitian Revolution in 1791, who helped shape the first independent nation in the Caribbean; Henry Ford, the automobile magnate from Detroit, who perfected mass production; Giulia Schucht, the wife of Antonio Gramsci; and John Chavafambira, a Manyika nganga who moved from his home in Zimbabwe to Johannesburg in the late 1920s and became the subject of the novelistic narrative Black Hamlet (1937) by South African psychoanalyst Wulf Sachs. By bringing these four characters together, Friedl opens new possibilities for reflection on how historiography is being constructed.
The Dramatist (Black Hamlet, Crazy Henry, Giulia, Toussaint), 2013
sculpture
Wood, metal, fabric, leather, glass, hair, straw, oil paint, nylon strings, dimensions variable
Collection Carré d’Art – Musée d’art contemporain de Nîmes
installation views: KW institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, 2022, Photo: Frank Sperling
and Guido Costa Projects, Turin, 2013, Photos: Maria Bruni
Peter Friedl
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).
- Anna Boghiguian
- Candice Breitz
- Marco A. Castillo
- CATPC
- Alice Creischer
- Chto Delat
- Clegg & Guttmann
- Eugenio Dittborn
- Heinrich Dunst
- Anna Ehrenstein
- León Ferrari
- Peter Friedl
- Sophie Gogl
- Barbara Hammer
- Ramon Haze
- Hiwa K
- Simon Lehner
- Renzo Martens
- Chris Martin
- Frédéric Moser & Philippe Schwinger
- Oswald Oberhuber
- Mario Pfeifer
- Dierk Schmidt
- Santiago Sierra
- Michael E. Smith
- Franz Erhard Walther
- Clemens von Wedemeyer
- Tobias Zielony