Video Works

HERR KARL AUS NEMSA

HERR KARL AUS NEMSA 

Shahram Entekhabi / Helmut Kandl:
Single channel video
12:10  min, stereo, non-dialogue

"Ideological images construct identity through the negative distinction from the Other."

— Kathrin Becker

Herr Karl aus Nemsa is a collaborative work by the Berlin-based artists Shahram Entekhabi and Helmut Kandl. The project consists of a series of photographs and a video. The underlying visual material derives from the photographic archive of the Lower Austrian State Museum and includes ethnological documentary photographs taken by European photographers during their travels to the Balkans, the Arab world, and Africa south of the Sahara. These images were originally used as teaching aids in Austrian schools.

Artistic engagement with archives often involves the decontextualization of existing material in order to reveal hidden meanings embedded within the images. In this sense, Entekhabi and Kandl rearranged the archival material and combined it in the video with textual quotations from the novels In the Gorges of the Balkans, Through the Desert, and In the Sudanby the German writer Karl May (1842–1912). More than any other author, May shaped the imagination of generations—primarily male youths—in the German-speaking world regarding North American Indigenous peoples, the Balkans, and the Arab world. His narratives frequently rely on strongly simplified typifications of individual characters as well as entire civilizational groups, which are often characterized negatively in contrast to the Christian European—particularly in relation to Muslims.

Through the combination of May’s quotations and the archival images, the work opens up a perspective on a “politics of representation” and on the ideological dimension of the photographic image, which is structured around the photographic gaze as its center and thus inherently contains a demarcation of the photographic subject from the world and from the Other.

A particular focus of the work lies in the continuity of ideological conceptions that construct identity through the negative differentiation from the Other. To this end, Entekhabi and Kandl juxtapose the archival images in their photographic works with quotations about the Islamic world drawn from recent issues of the German news magazine Der Spiegel. These quotations often appear almost indistinguishable from those of Karl May.

Text: Kathrin Becker

Berlin based curator and writer.

From 2001 to 2019 she worked as a curator, managing director and head of the Video-Forum at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.).

From February 2020, she works as the artistic director oft the KINDL – Center for Contemporary Art , Berlin, Germany.

Exhibitions & Screenings (selection)

2005: "i?" Shahram Entekhabi, PLAY Gallery for Still and Motion Pictures, Berlin, Germany (solo show)

2004: Not In the Sky and Not on the Earth, curator Emil Aleksiev — Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje, Macedonia (catalogue)