The New Flesh (MePri-Exhibition)

The exhibition “The New Flesh” was compiled by Clemens Krümmel and took place from September 13 till October 18 in the exhibition space “after the butcher” (Spittastraße. 25, 10317 Berlin). It was planned long beforehand – based not only on an affinity to the work of one of the space’s organizers, Thomas Kilpper, an artist practicing a contemporary form of giant-scale woodcut. Into the wood floors of historically significant buildings – for example at the canteen of East Berlin’s former Stasi Central – he has carved speculative group portraits of political individuals. The floors are then used as outsized printing blocks producing large prints on canvas.

Felix Reidenbach „die niedlichen: Unter den Tätern waren auch Frauen und Kinder“ 2009

“The New Flesh” combines materials from the collections of the Melton Prior Institute, most of which are drawing journalists’ renderings of slaughterhouses – next to wars and catastrophes, these industrial compounds were especially popular as pictorial reporters’ subject matter, as they could easily be perceived as enlightened depictions of modernity’s carnivore societies who tended to understand mass slaughtering on an industrial scale as “war in peaceful times”. Needless to mention that industrial slaughterhouses have time and again served as metaphorical reservoirs for the description of wars of mass destruction in the 20th century. Beyond this obvious historical reference, “flesh” in this exhibition will be treated as a metaphor for the crisis of material-based history images and the loss of control over one’s own body and life.

Das neue Fleisch / The New Flesh with Monika Baer, Sue Coe, Michael Dougan, Robert Estermann, Gregory Maass & Nayoungim, Felix Reidenbach, Alexander Roob, Dierk Schmidt, Xiaopeng Zhou and archival materials from the Melton Prior Institute, Düsseldorf