We were on the question of the exhibition tour with Jan Böhmermann & followed the question: Can GAG art improve the world?
It is Saturday morning, the sky shines in bright over Berlin and the flame of the inflatable statue of freedom hangs limp above the pond behind the world’s house. Curious journalist: Different sheets are together in the foyer of the HKW, hand over their cell phones and wait for Jan Böhmermann. This should lead through the exhibition, which he organized and curated together with the Royal group. The team around the satirist worked for two years at the conception of the takeover, which is to take place on Saturday, September 27th alongside the Federal Chancellery for three weeks.
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HKW-TAKEOVE à la Böhmermann
“Naaa, good morning you all, nice that you are there,” it sounds through the loudspeaker box that hangs on the hip of Böhmermann. He shuffles through the foyer, in jogging pants and ifa-hoodie, his head covered by a pink cap-he looks tired and exhausted, even a bit indifferent. You can tell that he is of little interest in the press person, they only seem to be the vehicle for the message of the exhibition. So while all media houses report in advance about the sausage that Jan Böhmermann and the Royal group want to hold up for society, he explains that it was only a PR message. “Above all, we actually wanted journalist: inside, like you have no idea what you would expect in the HKW.”
Successfully. It is by no means about sausage, but it is about freedom of expression, alienation in times of technocratic structures and the socio -political time capsule in which we are in. And, “from which we have to get out as long as possible,” said Böhmermann.
In April 1958, the USA of the City of Berlin, today’s House of Cultures in the World – – as a symbol of the Free West, set up in the center of the city, not far from the former wall. An interface quasi that manifests the political and historical connection of two free, democratic states. Böhmermann and his team transform this interface into a sophisticated memorial for three weeks and ask the question: Are we really so free?
“You maniacs! You blew it up!”
If you drive with line 100 towards the zoological garden, you can see the “Status of Freedom” by driving past. There the statue of liberty is set up, sunk to the chest in the water, the torch stands and falls with the degree of weather – the more gray and stormy the (political) climate, the lower the blazing fire hangs freedom and equality. In the background, a quote from “Planet of the Affen” (1968) is enthroned above the scenery: “You finally, real did it. You maniacs! You blew it up!” At the end of the cult film, the protagonist realizes that mankind has already destroyed itself and speaks this sentence, which has still seemed uncomfortable for almost five decades and is now also to serve as a warning in Berlin.
“This is not America,” says Jan Böhmermann Ernst into the microphone, in the background there is a recording of the US national anthem. But when I click through the news, the self -proclaimed “Land of the Free” doesn’t even appear so free. At the moment, families and municipalities are torn and criminalized by ICE authorities, formats of public broadcasters are discontinued at the same time because the interests of conservative media companies are over the right, finance wars, propaganda is thousandfold and right-wing extremist. The beginnings of this can also be traced in Germany, says Böhmermann. “We are in a time capsule that threatens to explode at any time,” he warns.
Finest satire and clear message
Böhmermann is apolitical, he says himself, but nobody is completely freed from political thinking. And even if the exhibition does not want to send a political message, you don’t buy the staged neutrality from it. At five different locations in and around the HKW, visitors can watch and judge visiting intertkiv and immersive what is going on in our society contaminated by digital media. The finest satire meets sharp criticism: technical, digital media act against culture against society. We eat ourselves, says sociologist Nancy Fraser and Jan Böhmermann delivers the props of this gloomy idea.
You can look directly into the Federal Chancellor by means of an elaborately attached mirror through a telescope, so that “the sovereign can finally be at eye level with the overnight representative”. A gigantic butter bust by Helmut Kohl can be found three floors deeper next to a retro smoking cabin. Not far away you can do an naturalization test with original questions, and in the entrance hall there are souvenirs of the Trump tower alongside NSU files and other artifacts from “12 years of radical, holistic satirical practice”. Further down in the building are tombstones that want to bury the financial strength of the richest men in Germany, and those who feel in Charity mood can save ores from their irrevocable destruction, #love. The status of freedom is measured by the weather and climate conditions, less than 30 meters further you commemorate the murdered Luise Nähring and in front of the building e-scooter start-ups find their brood nest.
A new National Gallery of the Screenshots shows the previously battered characters in the “ZDF Magazin Royale”: including Jens Spahn, Caro Daur, Diana to the Löwen, the neo -Nazis of Sylt and Elon Musk and … again Jens Spahn. Are these the personalities that shape our time? Definitely due to the lens of the media. “With black, red, gold all meant”, Böhmermann speaks with played seriousness into the microphone, from hip height the biting sound shoots at smoke. And while 40 adult people are silent, how the yellow smiley flag is raised, Pietro Lombardi plays from the moderator’s iPhone speakers. A bizarre show, in bizarre times – how suitable.
About the potential of constructive unreasonable
And yet “the possibility of unreasonable” does not provide anything new. Most circles are not unknown that the Internet has democratic dangers and the media reporting rightly loses trust. The exhibition looks much more like a materialized “ZDF Magazin Royale” episode. The moderator’s persona also fills the gaps of the embarrassing silence in the halls of the HKW, in general you often don’t know whether you should smile or howl. What is shown on site is the absolute misery of our social status quo – you see and feel that, and you still laugh. Everything is just fun. As long as you can do something like that, everything is fine – right?
The fact that there is countless hours of legal protection behind a critical exhibition can only be seen in the lower part of the exhibition. A large scaffolding shows how much work is behind the preservation of freedom of expression. “We received 15,000 criminal complaints between 2005 and 2025, and to make it tangible, we thought, we just hang them up,” said Böhmermann. It took 86 thousand pieces of paper to secure the right to believe and discourse in public law.
With the guiding principle of the exhibition, Böhmermann and his team combine quite dynamic components in terms of censorship and public, law and injustice. But above all: opportunities. The rigid dogma of rationalization ultimately led our society here. Our society was on a crossroads that nobody knows about – not even Böhmermann himself – how to deny him. You somehow have to come together, says the 44-year-old after the tour: “Everything we have is.” And further: “As long as we look at the world exclusively through the glasses of the media, we run the risk of increasingly alienating us,” Böhmermann fears.
Everything just wishful thinking?
Habermas and Horkheimer would probably agree. While you want to nest the gaps in which fascism, right -wing extremism and oppression, want to clean up with reason, the Royal group raises the proud unreason of the only reasonable attempt at rescue of the discourse. Stay curious, be open, the questions dare – it sounds pathetic, but if anti -fascism seems to be drifting as utopia, it is the same basic aspects that can change. “Maybe but not! Maybe after the three weeks we will also happen again and nothing, no change remains, maybe we don’t even encounter anything,” says Böhmermann. “But we can at least try it once.”
The world will not change the exhibition in the HKW, it does not have this claim at all. “Maybe that is enough for the moment, low -threshold art, a few gags, a little criticism, a bit of frowning together,” writes Marlene Knobloch for “time”. Böhmermann’s Takeover will certainly stimulate thought. However, the exhibition would probably leave a sustainable impression among those who do not already (want to) perceive the world in the critical-satirical Böhmermann-Thenke-if they also visit the exhibition. The Takeover could run the risk of lingering within this bubble.
When the doors of the pregnant oyster officially open at 12 noon, the first people are already waiting outside. The sun has also fought through and beams down on the building, tourist: inside you can take pictures in front of the Statue of Liberty – the light fire tautly lifted. The “Status of Freedom” conveys tentative security on this autumn morning. But how long?
“The possibility of unreasonableness” can be explored in the Berlin HKW until October 19. In addition to concerts from the flower garden and Ebow, the program around the exhibition also offers different performances, discussions and TV recordings.