A new exhibition in Berlin revisits the work of Christoph Schlingensief, the late German artist known for his provocative blend of art and politics. Titled It's Not My Problem Anymore, Deal With Your Own Shit, the show at Gropius Bau centres on Kaprow City, a 2006 play that sparked headlines for depicting the then Queen performing a Hitler salute.
Kaprow City and its provocations
First premiered at Berlin's Volksbühne theatre, Kaprow City drew on the happenings of US performance artist Allan Kaprow. The play turned its attention to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, re-enacting the paparazzi chase that led to her fatal crash. Diana appears in bed beside two men with Down's syndrome, and Camilla is pelted with animal blood. Schlingensief insisted the work was not meant as provocation but as an investigation into how Diana became a modern icon.
In the Gropius Bau's grand neo-Renaissance atrium, visitors encounter remnants of the carousel-like rotating stage Schlingensief called the "animatograph". Roughly half of the original set is installed on the same spot where Joseph Beuys, a major influence, once exhibited his Stag Monuments. Flickering black-and-white footage of a crucifixion plays beneath a slate board listing the stage's contents, from "Diana Girl Ballet" to "exorcism".
An artistic universe of media power
Stage designer Aino Laberenz, Schlingensief's widow who manages his estate, said the combination of Lady Di, speculation surrounding her death, and the myth that grew around her fascinated the artist. For the Volksbühne production, Schlingensief cast German TV personality Jenny Elvers, whose private life, like Diana's, was a fixture of tabloids. Laberenz cautions against viewing Kaprow City only through the lens of Diana, noting it belonged to a wider artistic universe where theatre, film and art collided with questions of media power and spectacle.
Schlingensief, who died of lung cancer just shy of his 50th birthday in 2010, grew up in the shadow of New German Cinema and was influenced by film-makers such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder. In The African Twin Towers, he took actors including Patti Smith, Irm Hermann and Robert Stadlober to Namibia to re-enact Wagnerian myths, confronting the legacy of Germany's colonial genocide. Namibian actors also took part.
Confronting the far right
Schlingensief's work on the far right remains strikingly relevant, not only because of the AfD's rise in Germany but also because of his hands-on confrontational approach to anti-immigrant politics. In his version of Hamlet, he brought former far-right extremists on to the stage at Schauspielhaus Zürich and later Berlin's Volksbühne, where they re-enacted Shakespeare's central murder scene amid far-right rock music and Nazi aesthetics. "We're not playing Hamlet, we're playing Germany," reads a Schlingensief quote taped to the exhibition wall.
The same attitude runs through Ausländer Raus! Schlingensiefs Container, his 2000 project in which asylum seekers lived under surveillance in a Big Brother-style container beside Vienna's State Opera, while audiences voted on who should be deported first, two people a day. Conceived in response to the far-right FPÖ's entry into Austria's government, the project turned deportation into an eerie spectacle.
Looking at these works today, one cannot help thinking of how far-right actors have learned to adopt such aesthetic spectacle as a political tool. The AfD's AI video Remigration Hit from 2024 revels in humiliating migrant men herded on to planes by Aryan-looking pilots. Schlingensief's work reads as a warning of how easily such cruelty becomes entertainment, and how readily the media help normalise it.
"I keep noticing in the commentary how much he is missed," says Laberenz. "But I also like to say that it's up to us, whether we work in the arts or not, not to hand responsibility over to someone else so that we no longer have to act." Christoph Schlingensief: It's Not My Problem Anymore, Deal With Your Own Shit is at Gropius Bau, Berlin, until 17 January.
