Appropriating Language #15 - State of Mind. Daniel Knorr

About

The work of Daniel Knorr presented by the gallery consists of two parts. The first part, consisting of documents that were destroyed by the Stasi, is on view in the gallery. The papers were destroyed in the last weeks before the re-unification of the GDR and FRG, of East and West Germany – shredded, crushed, and blended with water and oil, through converted farm machinery.

From secret documents and microfilms that underwent this process, cellulose clumps were formed, in whose coloured mass of gray, pale blue and pink, only a few letters are recognizable.

The second part, is installed in The Stasi Museum  “Runde Ecke” in Leipzig. Thereby, the object that the artist has exchanged for the document hunks, is exposed. The exchange object is a model the T-54 Soviet tank at the scale of 1:50 on a pedestal.

On the canon of the tank, hanging on a lace, there are preserved secret documents of original size. Among that, a leaflet is enclosed, written by three schoolgirls from Frankfurt Oder in 1968, to inform the East German population about the invasion of Prague by troops of the Warsaw Pact.

Knorr’s work is to be read as a  historical point, in which the “Mind” of a state is deleted as bio-political surveillance and materialized as a creative element.

The Stasi “Stone Documents”, point out furthermore, the aspect of repetition of obscure political acts in history, and encourage us today to be more vigilant in dealings with government bodies.