The viewer stands in the middle of two huge projection screens with excerpts from the daily news and the Current Camera, and original sounds from the news programmes can be heard from twenty loudspeakers. Television history and television production are equally the subject of the two artists from Munich. Looking back on two decades, the old images of the enemy between East and West television are dealt with as well as the advance of the “private” stations and the 3rd channels. Steinle (born 1959) and Rosefeldt (born 1965) have sifted through material from three decades in archives. Through montage, they created endless series of formulations and gestures that reveal the stereotypes of television and the world theatre that is re-enacted every evening. At the same time, the monumental video installation documents a comparison of medial communication of reality in East and West in a haunting and cheerful way.
In addition to the video installation “news”, which has already been shown successfully in Düsseldorf and Karlsruhe, photographs from the two work complexes “Unknown Cathedrals” and “Detonation Germany” can be seen for the first time in Leipzig. The deserted and abandoned buildings in the heart of Paris, long forgotten, only become visible in their dimension and beauty – as cathedrals of the industrial age – in the huge panoramic photographs by Steinle and Rosefeldt. With “Detonation Germany”, the artists show blast sites from West Germany’s economic miracle and the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the photographs of the two artists, the fascination that accompanies the destruction resembles a last rebellion before oblivion.