++++ Right next to the Flößer Bridge where a lot of homeless people sleep and where, in television crime series shot in Frankfurt, corpses used to be pulled out of the water, and where today borders of dog-roses and freshly planted trees are supposed to improve the atmosphere – this is where Ibon Aranberri has positioned his contribution to Manifesta 4.
The whole thing reminds you somewhat of an oversized bus stop with a platform made of concrete and a black steel roof. The back wall is used for a reproduction of one of the most famous paintings from the last century, Picasso's Guernica.
There are few artistic expressions which have been burnt into the collective memory so deeply as this monumental picture. Created in 1937 after the bomb attack by the infamous Legion Condor, which utterly destroyed the "holy city of the Basque country", it is the first painting in which Picasso steps onto the scene in an openly political way and with moral accusation. It is a memorial against violence, against the arbitrariness of the Spanish Civil War and wars of mass annihilation by means of an allegorically encrypted language of images. At the same time it stands for the potential of painting to bring something which has been censored (the murders at Guernica were denied by those involved) into public awareness.
The version by the Basque artist, Aranberri, however seems remarkably lifeless. With its hard contours, everything seems as if it had been accurately copied. The chiaroscuro modulations of the original have been replaced by stark black-and-white contrasts. What is pure horror in the form of distorted faces, mouths torn open and arms raised in desperation in Picasso's painting, becomes a ritual litany of a famous canon of forms in Aranberri's work – rigid, frozen and sterile. He drags out an event which has been forgotten once again in order to question it anew in the present day about what it has to say. The result is sobering. Basically, nothing has changed.
Aranberri probably does not know anything about the corpses of television crime series dragged out the Upper Main Quay, and it is also uncertain whether he planned the view of Gianni Motti's copy of the prison cell of the Kurd leader, Öcalan, on the opposite bank of the River Main. Nevertheless it fits somehow. jdv
Obermainkai, Flößerbrücke, until 25 August.