Third Text

29 January 2025

Ziyao Lin

Ersan Mondtag, Monument eines unbekannten Menschen (Monument of an Unknown Man), 2024, installation view (exterior), the German Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale, 2024, photo by Andrea Rossetti

When I first arrived at the German Pavilion in the Giardini at the 2024 Venice Biennale, what stood before me was a massive mound of earth. Thick layers of sediment formed an impassable physical barrier. At first, I did not even realise it was an artwork, nor that it covered the entrance, until I saw the exhibition label. I made my way around through a narrow side door to be greeted by Yael Bartana’s large video installation. In the misty forest, the figures of people flickered in and out of sight, veiled by the surrounding haze, as if they were ethereal shadows emerging and retreating into the haze. They raised their hands, as if summoning something from the beyond, or perhaps bidding a final farewell to all that was. Why, I wondered, does entering feel like saying goodbye? Amidst the dim lighting and the reverberating echoes of sound, I caught a glimpse of a spaceship hovering across from me. It radiated a sacred red glow, irresistibly drawing me closer – compelling me to step forward, again and again, toward the darkness beyond.

Yael Bartana, Farewell, 2024, single channel video, 15.20 mins, part of Light to the Nations, 2022–2024, installation view in the German Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale, 2024, photo by Andrea Rossetti

The exhibition was titled ‘Thresholds’, a temporary space situated between a vanishing past and an as-yet-unrealised future. ^[1]  It represented a transitional state, a liminal space bridging two worlds. A state of moving from one condition to another, the unknown and the possible. As the boundaries blur and dissolve, the German Pavilion’s aesthetic dominance was stripped of its power. This journey navigates the uncertain terrain between past and future.

The story begins with Ersan Mondtag’s Monument eines unbekannten Menschen (Monument of an Unknown Man). Stepping into the house that the artist built in memory of his grandfather, Hasan Aygun, felt like entering a post-industrial ruin, as well as the dust of history. Here, life unfolded in walkable architectural form, where the dimensions of existence were reduced to nothing but memory. The once-white curtains had long turned murky, a corner of the wallpaper peeling away from the wall, while the mirror in the bathroom was so tarnished it no longer reflected the visitor’s face. In the bedroom, the only source of orange light came from a ‘weeping lamp’. Dust gathered on the lamp, resembling dried bloodstains or the ghostly image of an infected lung on an X-ray.

Ersan Mondtag, Monument eines unbekannten Menschen (Monument of an Unknown Man), 2024, performance view, the German pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale, 2024, photo by Thomas Aurin

Hasan Aygun, who came to Germany as a guest worker, worked at Eternit, a company specialising in asbestos-cement building materials, for over thirty years. The company’s name, deriving from the word eternity, carries a promise of permanence, while the term guest worker inherently suggests something temporary. Being a guest worker is both a promise and a lie. These foreign labourers toiled day and night, producing Eternit tiles, Eternit roofs and Eternit flowerpots – materials that were cheap, durable and non-flammable, driving prosperity. However, it wasn’t the workers’ stay that was short-lived but their lives. What lasted was the irreversible damage caused by asbestos to their bodies. ‘Eternity’ never belonged to the labourers; it belonged to the continuation and expansion of capital. When Aygun first left his wife to go to Germany, he said: ‘I’m going and when I’ve earned 100,000 lira, I’ll come back.’ ^[2]  He only came back for good for his own funeral. He didn’t know, when he left the village to escape poverty, that the opportunity would be a fatal trap. He didn’t know that his glorious labour would bear the poisonous fruit that would erode his body. ‘They treated me like dirt.’

The final part of the work, and the highest level of the ‘monument’, is simple: a shovel and a dual-screen video installation. In the video, the actor playing the ‘grandfather’ buries himself under a foggy sky. As he uses his hands to slowly cover himself with soil, then cradles his head in reflection, I couldn’t hold back my tears. At that moment, I felt as though Benjamin’s Angel of History swept past overhead, flying towards the lake just beyond the window. Where we perceive a chain of events, Benjamin’s angel sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. ^[3]

Postwar German society bore the weight of collective trauma, and the fate of the working class, especially that of immigrant labourers, was often incorporated into the nation’s recovery and modernisation processes. Yet they remained marginalised in reality. The ‘grandfather’ who worked at Eternit symbolises this group, viewed as contributors to Germany’s ‘economic miracle’ but forgotten in the writing of history. Through his theatrical visual language, the artist exposes the contradictions within this historical memory: the individual’s suffering becomes a blind spot in the grand national narrative.

Mondtag’s choice to use Eternit material in constructing the monument inherently symbolises both permanence and fragility. It evokes hidden, ignored and forgotten histories, unresolved pain and the shadows cast by social progress. Life is consumed by the endless cycle of production and consumption. History is not merely the epic of victors; it is also a tragic song composed of the lives and deaths of countless unnamed individuals. The angel’s gaze is fixed on the past, seeing only the ruins and suffering of history. Yet, his stance is helplessly pushed forward by the storm of progress, into the future.

If Mondtag’s work is seen as a reflection on the heavy weight of the past, then Bartana’s serves as a vision of the future. From the ruins of history emerges an ideal world beyond. Bartana’s Farewell portrays a ritual before a spaceship embarks on a journey to distant galaxies, with the ethereal movements of the dancers expressing a sense of longing and anticipation. The core concept of Light to the Nations is ‘tikkun olam’, the urgent task of repairing the world. ^[4]  The spaceship, derived from the Sephirot imagery of Kabbalah, ascends into space to heal the wounds inflicted by humanity. The Messianic promise of redemption is fulfilled here, as humanity embarks on a collective journey while Earth undergoes recovery. Through the tension between future and present, these two works raise a critical question: can we truly transcend the current social crises and enter a new societal paradigm?

Yael Bartana, Light to the Nations – Generation Ship, 2024, 3D model, installation view in the German Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale, 2024, courtesy of the artist and LAS Art Foundation, photo by Andrea Rossetti

Light to the Nations is a work that replaces the fulfillment of hope with a vow. It awakens from the symbols accumulated from the past, igniting an enlightenment toward the future and resolving the dilemmas of the present. Compared to Mondtag’s work, which carries an undertone of historical melancholy, Bartana presents a more optimistic vision of the future. She seeks a balance between technology and mysticism, drawing future insights from the wisdom of the past. In the dazzling glow, the future feels within reach. Bartana’s work does not directly depict the social crises of today but instead invites the audience to reflect on the present through an escape into the contradictions of the world and a utopian vision of the future. Utopia and dystopia are intertwined and interdependent.

‘Thresholds’ was not just a transition between time and space; it also represented the awakening of a desire for the deterritorialisation of political imagination. It acknowledged the fragility and uncertainty of history while hoping for the arrival of transformative possibilities. The exhibition existed between memory and reality, between the individual and the collective, between allegory and ritual, between endings and renewals, and between despair and hope. At certain moments, forgotten voices were revived, and hidden images remembered. Redemption becomes a practice in an infinite space – delicate yet filled with potential. Every second could be the moment when the Messiah steps through the doorway, renewing history through the present. Yet the future’s vision cannot escape the burdens of the past. The monument, inescapable, is our historical baggage, and the spaceship, despite embodying the ideal of technological redemption, inevitably carries the scars of the past. The tension between the two artists’ works creates a powerful dynamic. The ‘threshold’ is a boundary that is difficult to cross, representing the unresolved tension between them.

On my last day in Venice, I returned to the German Pavilion, hoping to catch a live performance. The staff informed me that the performances had long since ended. All I could do was observe the faint traces of human presence in the dust – tiny reflections of countless individuals in the long course of history. Standing in the exhibition space, time did not unfold linearly; instead, it rippled slowly, colliding with the threshold. Inside the threshold lies the past – the storm of ruins and the towering monument to the unknown man. Beyond the threshold is the future – the ritual of the dancers, the spaceship preparing for the Messianic moment. Time grants us both past and future dimensions simultaneously, as the Angel of History silently flies past the threshold.

^[1]    ‘Thresholds’, curated by Çağla Ilk, featured the work of Yael Bartana and Ersan Mondtag in the German pavilion (20 April – 30 September 2024); besides the work of Bartana and Mondtag, ‘Thresholds’ also featured work by Michael Akstaller, Nicole L’Huillier, Robert Lippok and Jan St Werner on the island of La Certosa.

^[2]    See ‘German Pavilion 2024: Ersan Mondtag’, accessed 10 September 2024

^[3]    See Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, Hannah Arendt, ed, Harry Zohn, trans, Schocken Books, New York, 2012, p 257

^[4]    See ‘German Pavilion 2024: Yael Bartana’, accessed 10 September 2024

Ziyao Lin is an artist and currently a PhD student at Loughborough University. She obtained her undergraduate degree in Digital Media Arts from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, and a master’s degree in Digital Media from Goldsmiths, University of London. Her creative endeavours span digital art, experimental video and installations, focusing on themes such as the relationship between individuals and nature, technological ethics and micro-politics.