Power and helplessness

How do you experience yourself in society? As an individual who has “creative power”? Or as a relationship person who is effective in teamwork? Or as a powerless cog wheel in the gearbox of a state apparatus?

This question about the role of the individual in society is the subject here. Inge Mahn’s monumental work “Mahn-Mahl Mahn-Mal” makes us feel uneasy. The artist has us step up to a festive table – but negates everything we associate with it: The liveliness, the relationships, the individuality. Visible is a void, a frozen hierarchy, the absence of the human.

War is also a theme here – as it is in other works in this room: as an exceptional state of social conditions that makes the (mis)use of power and the experience of powerlessness particularly drastically visible.