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Die Praktikantin während der Firmenfeier in der dritten Ferienwohnung des CEOs, als die Kunde vom Verlust von Aktienkursen eintrifft Yves Iwanetzki Maik Schneiker

Die Praktikantin während der Firmenfeier in der dritten Ferienwohnung des CEOs, als die Kunde vom Verlust von Aktienkursen eintrifft

Yves Iwanetzki

Maik Schneiker

HD Video 1:30 min

Director: Yves Iwanetzki, Director of photography: Maik Schneiker

In the midst of the noise from the exuberant company party, between prosecco and exaggerated toasts, she sits alone. The intern. Hardly anyone knows her name, even fewer know what she's doing there in the corner. Yet she's otherwise known for her cheerful nature. Someone who makes everyone laugh when the mood turns sour. Just moments ago she was supposed to print documents, now they lie scattered beside her. Among seemingly trivial forms, she has discovered something. An internal memo with alarming numbers and a table with red-marked losses. Everything points to a massive drop in share value. Concealed. Covered up. And all this in the champagne light of the CEO's third vacation home. There's a suspicion hanging in the air that the company is on the verge of liquidation. Jobs, livelihoods, all of it could be in danger. She sits there, motionless. Hands folded, gaze lowered. While the others celebrate, she doesn't know whether she should speak up or remain silent. (Text: Yves Iwanetzki, translated)

A picture of a picture, a tableau vivant, is simultaneously an independent image, a quotation of reality, a metaphor, a projection, and a visible representation.

The Hamburg art historian Aby Warburg called image motifs that move independently through space and time "automobile Bildfahrzeuge" (mobile image vehicles) in the 1920s — motifs that encounter us on different carriers in different places, thus leading a kind of life of their own. For instance, in Renaissance painting, pictorial formulas from antiquity were rediscovered, quoted, and further developed. A particular "mobile image vehicle" were and are the so-called tableaux vivants: reenactments of paintings, living pictures of pictures, which enjoyed great popularity especially in courtly societies of the 18th century and were performed like a kind of silent theater. The mise-en-scène of an arrangement creates the performative foundation from which and through which an image becomes visible – it appears. This creative process recalls magical practices, in that an image is conjured up within a group of people. In its dialectic of animation and petrification, the iconic motif of the Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci— created around 1500 as a wall painting — travels through over 500 years of cultural history to appear here in the exhibition in 2025 in a new context as quotation and chronoference. Chronoferences are the possibilities of a present to relate to past times. Thus the figures on the tableau vivant wear business clothing from the 21st century, and instead of bread and wine, laptops and energy drinks lie before them on the tables.

Moreover, it is the students themselves who appear in the tableaux vivants, thereby following the model of an artistic practice. Painters of past centuries frequently incorporated themselves or fellow artists into history paintings, assigned them characters, and thus appeared as masked witnesses of the depicted scenes as well as of their own art.