Elmar Hess

Elmar Hess (b. 1966; lives and works in Berlin and Hamburg) goes all out. He is serious about the idea that the artist, by radically and obsessively focusing on his own I with its histories and yearnings, its conflicts, dreams, and fears, can distill a form of worldliness that transcends the private realm to convey a universal message. In addition to film and video pieces, Hess' oeuvre includes multimedia installations for which he designs thematically interlocking rooms. Made up of multiple chapters, their structure is comparable to the dramaturgic development of a film. The relationship dramas he stages in his works come across as the products of systemic constraints that force the actors' hands; Hess usually equates the subjective processes to a cascading fantasy of historical events. People seem entangled in the mechanical procedures of everyday life or appear as agents in a metaphorical armed engagement that rages in the vacuum between social, historical, and objective relationships. With essays by Stephan Berg, Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen, Sabine Maria Schmidt, Heike Catherina Mertens, Barbara Steiner, and others.