Reenactment MfS

Arwed Messmer

Arwed Messmer (born 1964) narrates history in his photographs. In his current work, he once again embarks on a search for the remaining traces of the past, casting an artistic eye at the visual legacy of East Germany’s secret service.
The files of the East German Ministry for State Security (MfS), or Stasi, contain countless photo documents about the many unsuccessful attempts made to flee over the Wall. For his images, the artist combined material from the Stasi Records Agency, resulting in complex collage made from found, altered, and re-contextualised photo documents and the artist’s own photographs that literally gets under the viewer’s skin. Twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Reenactment MfS addresses an important aspect of recent German history in a new way that frames an alternative position to photography’s function as historical document. With ‘documentary empathy’ (Florian Ebner), Messmer inquires into the authenticity of the documentary image, which can never be entirely free of orchestration.