Jonathan Meese

Jonathan Meese is considered a shooting star of the international art scene and his works, actions and performances have created quite a stir worldwide. His extensive installations are always linked to the place where they are set up and the artist always experiments with the multilayered chorus of the different media, painting, video, stage design, and also with a wide range of different materials. He performs with an incredible speed and intensity, is unbelievably productive, intoxicating. Playful, “like a baby animal”, he throws about the wreckage pieces history, the indestructible (bad) dream figures from the arts, from politics, from history. His cosmos is populated by Stalin, Hitler, Nietzsche, Marx, Wagner, Saint Just, Hagen von Tronje, but most of all by the big heroes of film history, by the modern Caligula, by Spartacus and Zardoz. He gives the audience a lot to digest, not out of a predilection for the irrational but in order to make us strong and resistant against dictators. He demands neutrality and hermeticism against interpretation pressures and demands that we accept the images that are there. The point here is not comprehension because there is nothing to comprehend. Meese’s Lecture-Performances are not noisy but intelligent, insistent and a play with the debris, the myths and sediment layers of Berlin. Theatrical tours de force that become more exciting the more resistance they encounter. Jonathan Meese, born in 1970 in Tokyo, lives and works in Hamburg and Berlin.