A MAJOR art exhibition will focus on the symbol of the exhausted citizen as a political dissident.
The Prince Of Homburg at Dundee Contemporary Arts sees multimedia artist Patrick Staff (right)debuting a new video installation and a series of works in sculpture and print.
The works are influenced by Staff’s interpretation of a play of the same name by 19th-century German writer Heinrich von Kleist.
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The 1810 play opens with a disoriented prince sleepwalking in royal gardens, exhausted by war.
“When I was asked to do this show at the DCA about a year ago, I was thinking a lot about the political situation that we’re in,” says the LA-based English artist, who uses they/them pronouns.
Though little-known in the UK, the German Romantic is a household name in his homeland.
“The prince is exhausted as his unnamed country has been at war for three years,” Staff says. “Living between the UK and US, I sometimes feel in this endless war, this endless occupation. The play has some funny contemporary parallels.
They continue: “These times are relentlessly exhausting. There is a strange kind of process that is happening where it wears you down and it wears you down to this point of exhaustion.
“I began to realise that, at that point where you think you’re beyond exhaustion, is also maybe a generative point from where you can start to dream differently. Though it comes from this place of desperation, you can start to think of living differently.”
High on the walls of DCA’s gallery spaces, Staff has installed a sculpture which resembles the architecture of royal properties. Also on display are a series of large scale hand-processed photogram prints and a video film which splices together interviews, conversation, found footage, hand-painted animation, songs and a narration of Kleist’s play by artist, writer and performer Johanna Hedva.
A text by Hedva accompanies the exhibition, with another by critical theorist Isabel Waidner.
A core question of the play is whether the sleepwalking prince is alive at all, says Staff.
“He keeps asking the audience: ‘Am I alive or dead?’” they say. “It’s a question none of us can really get our heads around. The collapse and fall of something and the creation of something new are seen as quite unimaginable to us. Maybe the end of Europe, the end of capitalism, maybe the end of America is too much for us to handle, but it’s happening. For me, it’s super-generative, playful but also kind of scary.”
Until September 1, Dundee Contemporary Arts, 10am to 6pm, Thursdays 10am to 8pm, free. 01382 432 444. Tel: www.dca.org.uk
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