HAPPYLAND [no first aid] / video installation
The iconic piece “Five Car Stud” by Edward Kienholz has left an indelible mark on my memory when I saw it as a child. An installation with life size figurines surrounded by five cars, it describes in graphic detail a gruesome hate crime, in which white men castrate a Black man they have wrestled to the ground. On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of this work (it was first shown during Harald Szeemann’s legendary documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972) I have reexamined it in two video installations, which were on display during documenta fifteen in 2022. “Five Car Stud 2.0: Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior” and “HAPPYLAND: No first aid” both ask, albeit in different ways, where we stand fifty years later with respect to racist hate crimes.
Five Car Stud 2.0: Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior
During my research for this project I put a special focus on understanding the root causes of racist violence. It appears that the underpinnings and motivations of these types of crimes have not changed significantly in the last 50 years.
But what did fundamentally change since then are the paths and, more importantly, the catalysts leading to radicalization. Which has brought my attention to the pivotal role social media play on this societal battlefield. It comes as no surprise that Facebook has played a big part in this. However, the extent of it, the active complicity of Mark Zuckerberg and how trackable the effects are, are shocking even to an educated audience.
The title “Five Car Stud 2.0: Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior” borrows a euphemism used by Facebook employees to describe the activities of bad actors on their platform by using multiple fake accounts.
In The lasting legacy of Mark Zuckerberg I describe these issues and the sources for my research in greater detail.
HAPPYLAND: No first aid
This video installation was part of the group show “Erste Hilfe/First Aid” at Hugenottenhaus in Kassel, Germany. I decided turn the motto of that show upside-down in reference to a real life event: no first aid was given by police officers who were called on November 24,1990 in Eberswalde (Germany) as Neo-Nazi skinheads trampled a Black man named Amadeu Antonio Kiowa into a coma: they simply stood by and watched. He later died from the injuries suffered on that day.
When “Five car stud” was shown at documenta 5 in 1972, it had the unintended consequence that the German audience embraced this work as a welcome deflection from their own past.
HAPPYLAND: no first aid, video installation, 2022
HAPPYLAND: no first aid, video installation, 2022
The focus of this piece is the disconnect that still dominates the discourse on race in Germany. The vast majority of Germans clearly reject racism. They pride themselves in having had a reckoning with the holocaust and having, by and large, sworn off the Nazi ideology for good. When it comes to anti-Black racism, however, they live in “HAPPYLAND”: The gaze firmly homed in on police brutality in the U.S., the white majority in Germany concludes that, since most of them are by self-definition not racists, and since in Germany as a Black person you don’t risk your life for a minor traffic offense, it is largely an American issue. And if something does happen in Germany, the real racists are always others: Neo-Nazis and AFD voters.
The term “HAPPYLAND” was coined by Afro-German author Tupoka Ogette to deconstruct this delusional notion in her book Exit Racism. In it she describes the state of blissful ignorance white people find themselves in before they have actively dealt with issues of racism in Germany.
This video installation is ultimately not about violent extremism. Rather, it is an invitation, a nudge, for an ostensibly enlightened - white - audience to step out of HAPPYLAND and question its own self-image by digging deeper into the less visible ways white people engage in micro-aggressions and other unwitting forms of racism.