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Storyboard (Monuments Men), 2015

Mixed media installation

The installation STORYBOARD (MONUMENTS MEN) was made for the Gorki Theater, Berlin, in 2015. In a perhaps reckless act of simplification that flirts with the building blocks of conspiracy theories, Zielony’s four glass display tables trace connections between Nazi looted art, Germany’s newly confident museum and restitution policies, George Clooney’s campaign against genocide and his appearance in a Nespresso advertising spot, and Napuli Langa’s occupation of a tree on Oranienplatz. Are these all connected? In a way they are. In 2013, the very rooms of Berlin’s Palais am Festungsgraben for which Zielony created his piece were among the locations where Clooney shot “The Monuments Men”, the heroic story of the American special unit that saved artistic treasures plundered by the Nazis. Some of them are now in the care of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (the Humboldtforum, currently under construction, is highly controversial).

Clooney’s work on humanitarian issues extends beyond the silver screen – it has taken him to outer space and back. Since 2010, his Satellite Sentinel Project has raised funds to help collect satellite-image evidence of crimes against international law. In the 2013 movie Gravity, Clooney then floated through space, dodging dangerous manmade debris. His dizzying metamorphoses – from movie hero to charity star, from Nestlé advertising icon to political agent – leave the facility manager of the Palais am Festungsgraben, whose observations are included in Zielony’s installation, unfazed. Magdi Lel-Gizouli, one of the authors in Zielony’s Citizen project, expands upon the complex set of issues, drawing connections between German migration law and the ways ethnographic collections are presented, between the refugee protests and the construction of a German arms factory in his native Sudan. Is this reality? Or fiction? It is a storyboard for a narrative about reality.

Tobias Zielony, Storyboard (Monuments Men), 2015, mixed media installation, 120 x 664 x 65 cm
Tobias Zielony, Storyboard (Monuments Men), 2015
Tobias Zielony, Storyboard (Monuments Men), 2015
Tobias Zielony, Storyboard (Monuments Men), 2015
Tobias Zielony, Storyboard (Monuments Men), 2015, mixed media installation, 120 x 664 x 65 cm
Tobias Zielony, Storyboard (Monuments Men), 2015, mixed media installation, 120 x 664 x 65 cm
Tobias Zielony, Storyboard (Monuments Men), 2015, mixed media installation, 120 x 664 x 65 cm
Tobias Zielony, Storyboard (Monuments Men), 2015, mixed media installation, 120 x 664 x 65 cm
Tobias Zielony, Storyboard (Monuments Men), 2015, mixed media installation, 120 x 664 x 65 cm

Video 1:
Magdi El Gizouli, Sudanese scientist and writer

Video 2:
Dietrich Senger, former caretaker of Palais am Festungsgraben

Assistance: Magdalena Bichler, Mailena Mallach
Research: Sara Löve Dadadóttir, Roman Deckert
Typography: Ina Kwon
Video editing: Janina Herhoffer
Translation: Carrie Roseland, Christina Gauglitz
Subtitles: Carrie Roseland
Commissioned by Maxim Gorki Theater, Berlin 2015

Photo credit: Tobias Zielony, Dietrich Senger, DigitalGlobe, Satellite Sentinel Project / Enough Project, Ethnologisches Museum Dahlem

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Tobias Zielony

Tobias Zielony is known for his photographic depictions of young people living on the fringes of affluent societies and social acceptance. For the past 20 years, Zielony has focused on suburban milieus that, from Canada to England, Ukraine, Israel, and Japan, have in common that they have fallen out of the promises of modernity's progress and are establishing a temporary life in their own cultural niches. What goes hand in hand with melancholy at the same time reveals a great human tenderness in the cohesion of precarious communities, which Zielony approaches and gives the space to stage themselves. In the process, Zielony's critical approach to documentary manifests itself in a specific aesthetic and relationship to fiction. His numerous institutional exhibitions include the German Pavilion in Venice 2015. Tobias Zielony is a professor in Hamburg since 2022.

Zielony´s work has been shown in many solo and group exhibitions recently such as Watching TV in Narva (KOW Berlin 2023), Dark Data (Marta Herford 2022) and Touch. Politiken der Berührung (EMOP Berlin, c/o Amtsalon 2023), Nach August Sander Menschen des 21. Jahrhunderts (Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen 2022).



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