Poetry of Power
News, Flipcharts, and Images Too True to Be Good

With works by

Harun Farocki

Michael Franz

Nina Kerschbaumer
Early-Career Fellow 2025–2026

Val Minnig

Rabea Ridlhammer

Jan Soldat

Curated by

Nina Kerschbaumer
Early-Career Fellow 2025–2026

Details

Venue and accessibility info: Collegium Helveticum

Opening hours (until March 30, during festival Echoes of Authority):
• March 25: Opening event/reception, 19:30-21:30
• March 26: 10:00-21:30
• March 27: 10:00-22:00
Opening hours (after March 30): Mon-Fri, 12:30-16:30

For groups of 10 or more people, such as school classes:
Pre-register your visit with the Events Office
(Group visits are also possible outside of the official opening hours from Tue-Fri by prior arrangement).

There are films for cinema, there are films for television, and there are films for exhibition spaces. There is music, stories about other people, and there are moments of silence. There are chairs for lounging, chairs for working, and there are chairs for waiting. If there is a front door, there is likely also a back door, and then, sometimes, there is a doorway to hell. This can make one feel like laughing, it can make one feel sad, or it can make one feel both at the same time. The question, however, is, what’s that got to do with me, or you, and us?

This exhibition is part of:

Echoes of Authority
Three Days of Workshops, Discussions, Exhibitions, Performances, and More

March 24–27, 2026

Convened by Zainabu Jallo, Nina Kerschbaumer, Anna [Anouk] Luhn, and Victoria Seca

Festival

Curatorial statement

In a present in which domination no longer primarily asserts itself through prohibition but through optimization, participation, and consensus, representation becomes a central site of its execution. Thus, power operates effectively under the guise of neutrality. It does not chiefly rely on spectacular images of domination, but rather on visual conventions whose apparent familiarity and instrumental rationality render them particularly resistant to critical scrutiny.

If authority does not merely employ images, but is itself constituted and organized through them, within which images does the contemporary configuration of the established order sediment? Through which terminological frameworks and visual regimes is its operative logic stabilized, and how do incentive infrastructures and habitual narratives contribute to the normalization of its imperatives? And finally, how can these dispersed particles of power be exposed, despite their very subtlety through which they all too easily evade perception?

Against this backdrop, Poetry of Power assembles a set of works—partly pre-existing, and partly newly commissioned—that test artistic strategies remaining immanent to the visual and technical apparatuses they address. Through acts of copy-pasting, ostensibly unmediated documentation, echoing or replication, these practices appropriate the very images through which power and authority circulate. The question is not simply how to borrow such images, but how to render them opaque to themselves.

Yet where the technical apparatus constitutes both the means and the object of inquiry, the notion of “direct communication with reality” becomes increasingly tenuous. Under these conditions, what could such immediacy possibly entail? Put differently, can critique meaningfully position itself outside its object without illusion? Here, it operates from within the very regimes of representation it seeks to unsettle.

In this sense, Poetry of Power resists the promise of reconciliation. It asks whether an adequate engagement with an irreconcilable reality might require images that categorically refuse aesthetic appeasement altogether—images commensurate with the violence of the order they render perceptible. Such a refusal, however, is not equivalent to a withdrawal from aesthetic registers, it is quite the contrary.

Exhibited works

In TURNUS, a 37-minute video originally produced as part of an installation of the same name devoted to renewable energy, Val Minnig presents—quite literally—systems of power. The work unfolds through seventeen distinct visual sequences, articulated in the aesthetic idiom of computer-animated infomercials. Retaining its original soundtrack—ranging from Claude Debussy to the theme song of the 1980s television series MacGyver—the video frames energy systems as self-regulating, independent, quasi-natural circuits.

This logic of total manageability finds a concrete social articulation in Harun Farocki’s A New Product, which documents consultant meetings by the Hamburg-based Quickborner Team, commissioned to design new working environments for Vodafone in Dusseldorf. Here, architectural models for open-plan offices function as diagrams of social behavior. No longer confined to scale models, these abstractions are projected onto living bodies, anticipating the movements, affects, and interactions of future employees, collapsing distinctions between work, leisure, and play into a seamless narrative.

Nina Kerschbaumer’s work confronts this soft coercion of managerial rationality with its juridical counterpart. Adopting the format of a court show, her latest video, protocols of a trial, follows the final day of a trial in Budapest. The visual material—news reporters, photographers, the judge, defender and wall paintings of the courtroom—alternates with an acoustic regime of authority articulated bilingually, live-translated from Hungarian to German and back into Hungarian: medical reports, legal definitions of what qualifies as terrorist organization, the pronouncement of judgment, and the final words of the defendant, who is ultimately sentenced to eight years in prison.

A related exposure of state power emerges in the work of German artist and photographer Michael Franz, who returns to his own archive of photographs and video footage from the G8 protests in Genova he recorded in his twenties. The resulting newly commissioned film, does not merely register the execution of power, but authority as such—an authority whose lethal consequences are inseparable from the political climate of Silvio Berlusconi’s second term as prime minister, becoming the longest-serving post-war Italian government to date. Situated in 2001, a year marked by profound medial, political, and economic shifts, the work occupies the threshold of the twenty-first century, when the expansion of the World Wide Web accelerates the transformation of political conflict into spectacle, when visibility increasingly substitutes for critique, and when images of protest and repression are drawn into a sequence of information, neutralizing violence by rendering it seemingly endlessly consumable.

Uni Qlo, Hunkemöller, Jack & Jones, Vero Moda, Granit, Bijou Brigitte, Market Lifestore, Bershka, Name it, Müller, Thalia, McDonalds, K/oto, Rituals..., O2, Monkl, Weekday, Urban Outfitters, Look 54, H&M, Sock Atomica, Calzedonia, Intimissimi, Peter Pane, Olymp & Hades, D. Machts Lounge, Maskenbildnerschule, Hana Artworks, BioTech USA, Intersport, Media Markt Smart, T.K. Maxx, Pace Pace, Wrapublic, Fresh Rolls, Wamu Chicken, Chutney Indian Food, Slice, Abadan Grill, Asian River Vietnamese Streetfood, Immergrün, Big Burger, K Chicken Korean Fried Chicken, Mexicali, Poké Mana, Vincent Vegan, Aldi, Cigo, Kon Kon Asia Market, McDonalds, Starbucks, Mudda Stadt, Apollo, tom hemps, comebuy, NAYIS, Sandbox VR, Deichmann, B.O Nails Spa, Woolworth, Mirad Barber Shop, Arena Apotheke, Rewe, dm, McPaper, Bloom Queen, Berlin Schuh und Schlüsseldienst, Wash Bear. Jan Soldat’s film Nothing New In The East turns toward the trivialized vocabulary of power—signs, storefronts, and architectural shells—beneath which the prevailing world order remains concealed, yet is non-stop inviting to participate. Or: “All the stores in the East Side Mall. A film as worthless as its content,” as Soldat himself puts it.

Duisburg-born, Rotterdam-based artist and scholar Rabea Ridlhammer responds to these films and their thematic constellations with a newly commissioned series of miniature sculptures that function as candlesticks, illuminating both the exhibition space and any melancholic sentiment that may arise when confronted with images which, by their very nature, cannot but disappoint. By reducing authority to a manipulable scale, her intervention calls into question the measurability of authority and the very conditions under which power becomes observable. The bad news is, in the act of scaling down, authority is neither dissolved nor aestheticized; it does not mean that visibility negates domination. The good news is, it does at least allow for the possibility of looking at it.

And now?

Artists’ bios

Harun Farocki was born 1944 in Nový Jicin (Neutitschein), at that time Sudetengau, today Czech Republic. 1966 – 1968 Admission to the just opened Berlin Film Adacemy, DFFB. 1966 Marriage with Ursula Lefkes. 1968 Birth of the daughters Annabel Lee and Larissa Lu. 1974 –1984 Author and editor of the magazine Filmkritik, Munich. 1998 – 1999 Speaking about Godard / Von Godard sprechen, New York / Berlin. (Together with Kaja Silverman). 1993 – 1999 Visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley. 2001 Marriage with Antje Ehmann. Since 1966 more than 100 productions for Television or Cinema: Children's TV, Documentary Films, Essay Films, Story Films. Since 1996 various solo- and group exhibitions in Museums and Galleries. 2007 with Deep Play participation at documenta 12. Since 2004 Visiting Professor, 2006 - 2011 full Professorship at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. 2011 – 2014 longterm project Labour in a Single Shot, together with Antje Ehmann. He passed away on July 30, 2014, near Berlin.

Michael Franz was born 1974 in Neustadt/Waldnaab, and lives in Berlin. He began his studies in 1997 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg with Professor Hans-Peter Reuter and at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe with Professor Dieter Kiessling. In 2003 he graduated as a Meisterschüler of Hans-Peter Reuter in Nuremberg. His work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions, most recently at Galerie Lars Friedrich and Kienzle Art Foundation in Berlin and the Neues Museum in Nuremberg. Together with Eva Raschpichler, Michael Hakimi and others, he organises the exhibition space kunstbunker - forum für zeitgenössische kunst e.V. in Nuremberg. He has taught at various art academies, was a professor ad interim of photography for contemporary art at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig and is currently teaching at the Art University in Linz, Austria.

Val Minnig was born 1991 in Chur, Switzerland, and lives and works in Zurich and Sent, Switzerland. Minnig completed a Master of Fine Arts degree at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) in 2020. Minnig's installation works use simple materials, some of which are found on the street, to create large-scale interventions. Using reduced formal language and often drawing on subjective feelings, the artist seeks ways to break down familiar relationships and present different forms of encounter, thus turning conventional power relations upside down. Exhibitions (selection): Istituto Svizzero, Roma/IT (2024); Kunst(Zeug)Haus, Rapperswil/CH (2024); Swiss Art Awards, Basel/CH (2023); Kunst Halle St.Gallen/CH (Solo, 2020), SALTS, Birsfelden, Switzerland (2020); Môtiers 2020 – Art en plein air, Môtiers/CH (2020); Saint Luke, Zurich/CH (solo, 2020); Espace 3353, Geneva/CH (solo, 2020); o.T. Raum für aktuelle Kunst, Lucerne/CH (2019); Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich/CH (2018); Swiss Art Awards, Kiefer Hablitzel│Göhner Art Prize, Basel/CH (2018 and 2016); Off Kunsthaus Glarus, Glarus/Switzerland (2018), Museum Folkwang, Essen/Germany (2018); Helmhaus, Zurich/Switzerland (2015); Koryo Youkobo Art Space, Tokyo/Japan (2015).

Rabea Ridlhammer was born 1990 in Germany and is based in Rotterdam and Duisburg. She has a background in fine arts and graphic design. In 2016, she graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, where she co-founded and organized various exhibitions and events at the illusive artist-run-space bunker0621. Her research-based work often results in wearable items, videos or printed matter, thus extending beyond writing. She got an MA of Art Praxis at the Dutch Art Institute. She has taught at the Zurich University of the Arts, the Merz Academy, the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and currently teaches at the University of Cologne.

Jan Soldat was born 1984 in Karl-Marx-Stadt (now Chemnitz) in the former GDR. From 1994 he attended the humanistic grammar school “Hohe Straße” (now Karl-Schmidt-Rottluff grammar school). In 2003, after graduating from high school and completing community service in the gastroenterological and dialysis ward in the Klinikum Chemnitz, he started studying business mathematics at the TU Chemnitz. In 2004 he dropped out and switched to the mechanical engineering course. At the beginning of 2006 he cancelled this also, followed by returning to the Klinikum Chemnitz, as a nursing assistant in the cardiac catheter laboratory. From August 2006 to February 2007, together with Frank Schubert, he made his first films as part of the SAEK (Saxon training and testing channel). At the same time, he worked within the Chemnitzer Kunstfabrik. There, too, filmic works were produced and he interacted with young and adult people with mental and physical disabilities. Subsequently, until September 2008, he made more films within the Chemnitzer Filmwerkstatt e.V. From October 2008 to March 2014, he studied film and television directing at the University of Film and Television “Konrad Wolf”, Potsdam Babelsberg. From October 2023 to April 2024 participant in the film school Friedl Kubelka.

Nina Kerschbaumer was born 1988 in Salzburg, Austria. She participated in the film school Friedl Kubelka in Vienna, studied at the Central Saint Martin’s College in London, UK, and under Harun Farocki at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, where she also received her doctorate in philosophy, supervised by Diedrich Diederichsen. She has been working for the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (ORF) as a camera assistant and teleprompter, and underwent training as a color corrector. From 2014–2018 she has taught photography at the International Summer Academy of Fine Arts Salzburg together with Valérie Jouve and Tobias Zielony. After having held a teaching assistant position at the Zurich University of the Arts and working at the Rote Fabrik in Zurich, she was a fellow at the Istituto Svizzero in Milan in 2024/2025. She lives and works between Vienna and Zurich, where she is currently an early-career fellow at the Collegium Helveticum. 

This exhibition has been made possible due to the generous practical support of Jamie Bisang and Andrea Truttmann, and the substantive advise of Eliot Gisel, Anouk Luhn and Mario Wimmer. A special thanks goes to the participating artists and to Antje Ehmann.