II.II.I8 DÄMMERUNG

Bettina WitteVeen continues with this exhibition about WWl her decade long exploration of the impact of violence, war and genocide on the individual as well as on society in general. In Il.Il.I8 Dämmerung she pays tribute to an important date in history and asks the timely question: "What are the parallels and what are the significant differences between 1918 and 2018?" The German exhibition title - Twilight, is meant to be dualistic: what is ascendent and visible on the horizon at sunrise and what is about to disappear in our time.

II.II.I8 Dämmerung is the fifth and last part of the epic visual poem titled "The Heart of Darkness" which was shown internationally. The prominent cruciform photo sculpture in this exhibition was first created for the installation When We Were Soldiers Once And Young in New York in 2015 which dealt with the physical, mental and spiritual trauma of combat. The photo sculpture, the drawing of the German artist Ernst Barlach (1870-1938) and the cross of nails donated by The International Centre for Reconciliation of Coventry / England form a visually strong unit with the altar. The altar with its rich cover of flowers and greenery serves as a powerful memento mori and the single white chrysanthemum in its midst represents the inviolate nature of all life - of life which wishes to live among life that also wants to be alive.

The entire installation is collage layered upon collage and allows the visitors the experience in fragments, that which they see and hear while simultaneously knowing about its entirety. WitteVeen seeks to create a multilayered and emotionally powerful experience in which the particular and personal is transformed into the general and universal. She wants to contribute to a spectrum of consciousness in which the physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual are of equal importance.

The imagery on the video screens shows a peaceful fertile land in the photographs of former World War I battlefields before war separated the life experiences of the soldiers from that of the civilians. The artist created collages by a time consuming and meticulous process from archival WW I photography. The collages tell about the combat experiences of the soldier in the video on the left side and of the suffering of the civilian population, including the 8 million animals that died in that war, in the video on the right. The resulting radicalization of the population from the war experience and destruction of their world is represented in red images from the Russian Revolution and the Weimar Republic. The video installation ends with a former battlefield aglow in twilight through which a military drone flies - this leaves the question about the consequences of today's technologies.

WitteVeen continues the technique of the collage in a sound installation of fragments of WWl poetry in the original languages English, German, French and Russian - the languages of the Allied forces that occupied Berlin after WWII. These fragments form new individual poems that end in a minute of silence.