Planetarische Bauern

The installation by Elske Rosenfeld (born 1974 in Halle (Saale), lives in Berlin) traces a circular path through the upheavals and revolutions of 1989/90, moving backwards and forwards in time as it explores the embodied nature of revolt and protest. In one video, two friends circle around Tahrir Square in Cairo in 2012, a year after the uprising began. After a revolution, everything is different – yet it can feel just the same, as if in a perfect loop. Surveillance footage taken by East German security forces on Halle’s Market Square on 9 October 1989 follows. The artist, then 15, was passing by, but didn’t dare get off the tram. A slideshow moves between 1989 and 2011, weaving together revolutionary gestures, dances and geometries, and entering into dialogue with selected works from Kunstmuseum Moritzburg presented as part of the installation. The Archive of Gestures captures the embodied experience of a moment of powerful yet incomplete emancipation – one that eludes dominant narratives of the ‘fall of the Wall’.