Listening Without Judgement: Silke Schönfeld at HMKV Dortmund
Silke Schönfeld (Millennial, German) offers cinematic glimpses into painful truths.
Silke is a storyteller in the truest sense of the word. She doesn’t invent stuff. Her stories don’t stem from her imagination, they’re not metaphors for something else. Her material is reality itself.
The space she exhibits in is unconventional: The Dortmunder U is a cultural center juggling plenty of functions, housing a cinema, a restaurant, a university research center, a library, the Museum Ostwall, and further exhibition spaces. To me, it’s an unusual setting that feels makeshift, temporary, waiting for something.
Sitting Down for a Talk
I felt like I ended up in the cinema of the building rather than in an art show. The space is dark, harsh flashlights light up certain areas, and then there’s the curtains. Tall, colorful velvet curtains wrap one of the five exhibition parts each. Sounds overlap. They don’t disturb each other, there’s just enough to grow curiosity about what’s behind the next curtain. There’s something theatrical to it.
Beyond the theatrical, the curtains convey discretion. Silke doesn’t stip the stories entrusted to her naked, they’re in safe hands. And some stories probably would have hoped to never see daylight. Not only does Silke vary the curtain colors for each one of the five films, but she also switches the seating.
One room offers a comfy amphi theater in a mustard yellow curtain cocoon. For another, Silke chose low wooden benches. An appropriate choice, considering she pulls me out to get some fresh air with this one: Conversations about childhood abuse take turns with peaceful visuals of garden flowers, which is so The Zone of Interest (2024) coded. And in this wide gap between horror and calm lies everyday life. It cruelly, indifferently goes on. Time will pass anyway.
Enacting truth
I entered an orange room. Cushioned cinema seats this time. The film: Two actors in a theater. They play around, chasing each other, laughing. Suddenly, the guy knocks the woman over. Their smiles fade. What’s going on? Are they still acting or am I seeing a real fight? Was the assault only “dienstlich” [work related], as TV host Thomas Gottschalk (Baby Boomer, German) would have put it?
I was looking for one moment Silke had spoilered me beforehand: She told me she used a Lars Eidinger (Gen X, German) monologue at one point. The actors speak German, in some instances, they switch to English. The same two actors recite chunks of speech stemming from various conversations, all related to film production or acting in some way. I loved the awkward silence of the two performers while getting touched up by the make-up artist when seconds earlier they were acting like best friends.
Then there’s a moment with the actress on her own. She talks about crossing lines and going beyond what’s accepted. I furrow a brow. She expresses her frustration about people constantly preying on failure. Hmmm…. “And all this…hatred…” BOOM! GOTCHA, Lars! I knew I heard this somewhere…
Writing this, I realized something else: What Silke does here reminds me of Roland Barthes (1915-80, French). In the ‘60s, that guy came up with a concept called “Death of the Author”: Meaning shouldn’t depend on who said something but exclusively on the words themselves. You shouldn’t look for the person to figure out what they said, no matter if the writing in question is a new piece or a 500-year-old manuscript.
Writer and comedian Marc Uwe Kling (Millennial, German) twisted this idea to absurdity: In his book series The Kangaroo Chronicles, he often starts his chapters with quotes that gain whole other dimensions through their intentionally wrong attribution. I mean, the phrase “Nobody intends to build a wall” means entirely different things depending on whether dictator Walter Ulbrich (1893-1973, German) says it or Bob the Builder, right?
After seeing the show, Silke told me that she exclusively used snippets from real interviews and press conferences with German and international actors. I wondered if I would have felt suspicious of the actress’s speech if I wasn’t waiting for Lars. I mean, I knew for sure when she dropped the hatred line. But even beyond that revelatory line, her statements were uncomfortably familiar. It’s exactly what male celebrities say after being caught in 4k doing some fucked up shit. Maybe it’s really not about who said it at this point cause it’s all of them…
The Quiet Before The Storm
In another room, Silke sits me down on grey seating blocks. I hate this kind, but it’s fine considering it’s only for seven minutes. It’s the only film with no speech at all. It is completely silent except for the surroundings in the filmed areas. No human contact this time, it’s just places: an empty German pub, a grass field, a village house. I only saw one car driving by. The void is haunting like the empty squares of Giorgio De Chirico's (1888-1978, Italian) paintings.
Silke adds explanatory text blocks to those visuals. Place and info. They remind me of dictionary entries. Impersonal, factual. What do the chosen places have in common? They’re dominated by right-wing communities. And they look surprisingly unassuming. I was particularly fascinated with the case of an academy in Saxony-Anhalt hosting right-wing seminars on such topics as Gender, Myths, War, Party Rule, Germany, Elites, and Homeland. Those could almost be leftist topics depending on how you twist them…
Silke carefully examines how those communities hijack leftist rhetoric and strategies: One community in Erfurt started a seemingly environmentalist initiative to prevent the construction of a mosque. In Halle, another extremist group founded a community space. I first only see close-ups of white walls smeared with splashes of orange paint. Finally, Silke reveals the previously only fragmented banner spelling “Patriotism instead of leftist violence”. I’m confused by the right-wing propaganda through tools I associate with antifascist squatting. At the same time, I have to face that spaces like this one, ridden with harmful ideology, fill a void for many young people in Eastern Germany, offering something that’s urgently missing: Belonging.
I just started a book Jody Korbach (Millennial, German) kindly gave me: It’s Tough Enough (2017) by Deborah Nelson. If I may translate the first sentence from the German edition:
“We are aesthetically, politically, and morally obliged to face reality, however painful it may be, without giving free rein to our own feelings.”
I think this is what Silke does. She isn’t reacting out of her own emotions, she’s not lashing out. Be it the trauma of her mother, the dooming spread of fascism, or the story of a burger restaurant run by a grandfather who never talked about his Nazi past. Silke observes attentively, letting the stories speak for themselves. She takes her time and that’s what you should take too when seeing this show.
Silke Schönfeld: You Can’t Make This Up, through February 2, 2025, at HMKV, Dortmund.
HMKV
Hartware MedienKunstVerein
inside Dortmunder U, Level 3
Leonie-Reygers-Terrasse
44137 Dortmund
Website
Instagram: @hmkv_de @silke.schoenfeld
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Jennifer
The Gen Z Art Critic