We are very happy to inform you about the beginning of Paul Pfeiffer’s solo exhibition „The Saints“ on Saturday, 10th of October 2009 in the Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwart - Berlin.

"The Saints" will be the first presentation of the homonymous work in Berlin, which was produced by Artangel (London) in 2007, and, with the support of the Outset Foundation (London), is now part of the collection of the Nationalgalerie. In relation to this seminal work, Paul Pfeiffer, curator Britta Schmitz and initiator Udo Kittelmann, will put two other works on view at Hamburger Bahnhof: the videowork „Empire“ (2004) and a new work, the sculpture „Vitruvian Figure“ (2009), which has been produced especially on the occasion of the exhibition in collaboration with the Sammlung Goetz, Munich.

The large-scale installation „The Saints“ is built from the memory of a now legendary moment of nationalised European mass culture as a space of sound and fragmented images. Its source is the FIFA endgame of 1966, in which England defeated the West German team 4:2.

The huge exhibition space into which the viewer enters when looking at “The Saints” (2007) is dominated by the sound, a mixture of the newly edited original recordings of the historic football chants, which carry in it an at first hardly identifiable irritation. Only a small LCD screen displays documentary recordings of the game in black and white, from which all but one player have been erased. Only Geoffrey Hurst, the goal scorer, is running unperturbed, hunting for an unseen aim.

The chanted hymns, which accompany the viewer throughout the whole room finally become embodies, when one enters a separate part of the room, in which two video projections are presented next to one other. The one on the left shows the documentary footage of a jubilating crowd of men from the Philippines, imitating the British soccer hymns, whilst the right projection is showing original historical black and white footage of visitors of the 1966 endgame. With their obvious accents and detachment from the historical events of 1966, the combined image evokes irritation. The frenetic chants of the now 40 years dated event, its excessive invocation of national collectivity seem misplaced and absurd, being confronted with their subaltern reflection.

The work "Empire" from 2004 continues the involuntary discomfort of "The Saints", which is achieved by the enforced identification of individual and collective identity and actions, on a very different level. Whereas "The Saints" deals with the spectacular, "Empire" focuses on the obsolescent, on appearances of a collectivisation in naturalised imagery. With the realtime duration of more than three months, the video "Empire" shows the construction of a wasp's nest by an unrecognisable number of individual insects. The long duration in which this collective work is exposed here, homogenises the individual acts involved to a point of incognizability, where normally those processes are represented in a mode of a time lapse.

Pfeiffers newest work "Vitruvian Figure" 2009 concentrates on a third aspect of the interaction of the mass and the individual: the space. Where the expanding installation of “The Saints” guides the viewers through the sound and the video projection “Empire” questions the possibility of experiencing duration, “Vitruvian Figure”, constructed from wood, glass and polished steel embodies the special aspects of mass socialisation. The wooden model of a quarter of today’s Wembley stadium is held by an angle of spyglass, so that the viewers gaze over the ranks of the stadium completes its symmetry into a panoptical oval. On its outside, this angle is fixated with polished steel beams, which even more enforce the panoptical and armoured impression of the sculpture.
 
In “The Saints” Paul Pfeiffer presents a far ranging artistic consideration with the political and aesthetic implications of mass cultural experiences, which, in between those three works systematically discuss the question of individual and social constructions of contemporary experience.

The gallery carlier | gebauer is very happy to present Pfeiffer's new work "Vitruvian Figure" (2009) in cooperation with the Sammlung Goetz, Munich and mixedmedia, Berlin. We are thanking Udo Kittelmann and the Hamburger Bahnhof for the concept of the exhibition. The exhibition is realised with the support of the Asian-Pacific-Weeks.

Duration: October 10, 2009 until March 28, 2010.