OFFSCREEN
Benjamin Heisenberg
Twelve Angry Men (Die zwölf Geschworenen)
16.–20.10.2024
Grand Garage Haussmann
43-45 Rue de Laborde, 75008 Paris, France
Benjamin Heisenberg’s installation Twelve Angry Men (Die Zwölf Geschworenen) challenges the interrelations of the artist’s and film maker’s imprinting and self- perception. Video works, pictures and historical artefacts form an environment that is evidence of Heisenberg’s incessant active process to articulate a mindset towards personal, family-, and German history. Twelve Angry Men (Die zwölf Geschworenen) condenses this quest that has been going on for many years, informing and shaping his work.
It is a series of suitcases and boxes, all of which come from the attic of Benjamin Heisenberg's grandmother and great-grandmother's house.One suitcase contains a completely preserved court uniform from the imperial era, wrapped in a newspaper from 8 May 1916, another a Wehrmacht uniform wrapped in a newspaper from 1945, and a third box contains carefully wrapped letters that have been artfully overgrown by a wasp's nest. Heisenberg himself has added a small blue clothes box, with his private riding uniform wrapped in a newspaper from 12 September 2001 - as a reference to the moment in his life that subjectively felt like the clearest approach of a great war. The other suitcases are empty, but lined with wrapping paper and another newspaper, which also tell of their time.
The twelve little ‘men’ with a magnifying glass for a head are, so to speak, inner parts of Heisenberg's personality, searching through the history of his family and making sense of it. They also give the installation the title Twelve Angry Men, after the feature film.
Arranged around it are four videos that deal essayistically with four terms that Heisenberg strongly associates with the history of the last century in Germany: Manipulation, Fiction, Faith and Romanticism. All the films are made from material closely related to him or his friends and always refer to his private past.
