1 Lost Paradise - Armin Kerber

Lost Paradise – “Tu n’as rien vu à Hiroshima”
can and Indian animals, such as lions and tigers. During the unrests following
1997, however, most of them were either “kidnapped” or killed.
Sala was featured prominently at Remind, the 2004 group show at
Kunsthaus Bregenz. The catalogue comments, “The loss of social order
becomes tangible in the juxtaposition of interior and exterior – of animal
enclosures and adjacent green spaces. Following the economic depression
of the late 1990s, only a few animals languish in decrepit cages. Packs of
dogs rather than people now roam about the rundown visitors’ facilities.
Masterless witnesses of urban decay, they have seized the space that has
become a mirror image of the decay of a repressive system and subsequent
economic bankruptcy. The original concept of a zoo as a representative
facility of display, education and science has been turned into its very opposite.
Anri Sala’s Arena has become a location that documents past imprisonment,
oppression and death. His focus on its geographical and
cultural origins provides a stark contrast to the present. The zoo recalls
Albania’s political and social past, as well as its present reality.”
The complex choreography of Dutchman Aernout Mik’s 2006 video
piece Scapegoats shows the rituals enacted between an
imprisoned civilian popu- lation and their paramilitary
guards. It demonstrates that it is an important, almost
self-evident concern of current art production to inflitrate documentary
strategies employed by television, the press, the radio and the internet. Infiltration,
montage and alienation are art’s strategies to denounce the ways in
which information and disinformation have been produced – not only since
the advent of “embedded” war journalism. It debunks the lies of the media,
usually by assuming the role of a counter-information platform, revealing
the potential plural forms of “information”. Resorting to mainstream codes
and reclaiming public space by means of aesthetic guerrilla tactics, art creates
a space wherein the power of the media can be discussed.
The Polish artist Zbigniew Libera illustrates this by re-producing
famous 20th-century press photographs, alienating them in such a way
that the viewer only realises at a second glance that something cannot be
right: for example, it is a mutilated Che Guevara who shares a peaceful
smoke with his persecutors; the face of the Vietnamese girl running away
from the Gis is smiling, as are the men behind the barbed-wire fence of
the prisoner-of-war-camp – as though they all lived in a world
in which information is part of the entertainment industry’s
drip-feed.
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