Die letzten Tage der Gegenwart
two 16 mm films, plasterboard walls, collages

At the centre of Andreas Bunte’s installation Die letzten Tage der Gegenwart is the 16mm film O.T. (Wohnung) documenting the interior of a high-rise apartment in a sequence of carefully arranged still-lives. The absence of the protagonists, that is almost over-articulate in the props, encourages the presumption, that the images have been recorded as a kind of securing of evidence or proof.

Thematic background for the staging is the German terrorism of the 60’s and 70’s, especially its minor parts like the example of Margit Schiller, whose approach to terrorism was motivated by the hope for a deeper meaning in life and the solidarity of a group rather than by radical political convictions. The reality of the underground, however, for her was determined by boredom, isolation and fear and only a few rather random actions. In the front part of the exhibition space, sectioned off by two plasterboard walls, there is a second 16mm film. In its almost motionless imagery the edit reminds one of a slide show. In an endless loop views of various public buildings line up. Church, petrol station, university, representational and residential buildings do not appear only as solitary edifices, but they also represent a type of building, metaphorically embodying the spirit in which it was developed. The film catches the inanimate surfaces of the buildings in a brief moment of their long permanence and thus reminds one of the act of their enlivenment through ideological interpretation of the most diverse kinds. In a series of collages Andreas Bunte has placed texts and drawings on design- and political magazines of the 1960's/70's.  The tone of the fragmented quotes (e.g. of G. Debord, R. D. Brinkmann, H. Marcuse, A. Freud) that have become unrecognizable by repeated rewriting and mixing with own texts, reaches from the gibberish of propaganda speech to melancholically transfigured prose. Formally the pages resemble confessional letters or agitprop broadsheets.

Starting from the real problem of smuggling secret messages to the RAF inmates, Andreas Bunte invents new techniques of disclosing conspiracy messages in some of the collages. In this allusion the works on paper look like found objects of which the author becomes unclear, not only on the level of the fictitious anonymous writer, who disguises his handwriting behind mechanical writing and printing methods, but also on the level of the artist himself, who remains covert behind his alter ego.