Wolfgang Oelze

Aktion # 96, Wolfgang Oelze and Galia Kodsi at 2025 ev, Hamburg

Erbe / Inheritance

7 million years ago: the lineage of mankind starts diverging away from chimpanzees. 73,000 years ago: the consequences of the “Toba” volcanic eruption reduces the genetic variety of Homo Sapiens to the population of a cave, in which the earliest pigment drawings were being created. 1866: Ali Rawda gives away his point of land in Beirut to American missionaries, who begin building a university. 1908: Parisian banker and philanthropist Albert Kahn uses the newly invented color slide glass plates in order to illustrate The Orient as well as the pathogen of syphilis. 2006: one could watch from the Al Rawda Cafe, on the outermost rocky point of Beirut, how Israeli warships are firing at the city. 2012: a pathologist from Bremerhaven bequeathes an extensive color slide archive of microscopic examinations depicting wart and cancerous tissue. In the present decade, another supervolcano may very well break out in Europe.

“Erbe” unites all of these events for three hours.

(Excerpt from the exhibition announcement for »Aktion # 96«, October 30th 2015)