Elisabeth Smolarz

Smolarz Farewell East Germany 01

Farewell East Germany, Videoinstallation, 2010, screenshot


Smolarz Farewell East Germany 02

Farewell East Germany, Videoinstallation, 2010, screenshot


Smolarz Farewell East Germany 03

Farewell East Germany, Videoinstallation, 2010, screenshot


Smolarz Farewell East Germany installation view

Farewell East Germany, Videoinstallation, 2010, installation view


The protagonists of the three channel video installation by Elisabeth Smolarz were asked to act out tasks which were imposed by the German Democratic Republic on all of it’s citizens until the fall of the Berlin Wall. After blind folding himself Peter S. assembles and disassembles an AK-47 rifle–a skill he learned during his military service in the National Peoples Army (the East German military). The center video shows a room, where Hans Dietrich Genscher and Eduard Shevardnadze secretly met in New York in 1989 to discuss re-unification of East and West Germany. In the third segment Uwe. B performs all Russian-language songs that he learned in school–most of them propaganda songs to encourage loyalty to the Soviet Union.

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