Lethal Love
2008
Aluminum venetian blinds, powder-coated aluminum hanging structure, steel wire, free-standing mirror wall, moving spotlights, scent emitters (Wildflower, Gunpowder)
Installation view of Lethal Love, Cubitt, London, UK, 2008
Photo: Andy Keate
Lethal Love
2008/2018
Aluminum venetian blinds, powder-coated aluminum hanging structure, steel wire, free-standing mirror wall, moving spotlights, scent emitters (Wildflower, Gunpowder)
Installation view of Triple Vita Nestings, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia, 2018
Photo: Carl Warner
Installation view of Triple Vita Nestings, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand, 2018
Photo: Sam Hartnett
Installation view of 21st Biennale of Sydney, Superposition : Art of Equalibrium and Engagement
Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, Australia
Photo: Studio Haegue Yang
Photo: silversalt photography
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Installation view of 21st Biennale of Sydney, Superposition : Art of Equalibrium and Engagement
Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, Australia
Video: produced by the Biennale of Sydney in Partnership with Motel Picture Company, edited by Studio Haegue Yang
Installation view of Double Soul, SMK – Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2022
Video: Barsk Projects, Studio Haegue Yang
Related Texts
Excerpt from exhibition guide of Double Soul, SMK – Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2022
Lethal Love is a seminal piece of how Yang incorporates historical events and biographical details directly or indirectly in an abstract interpretation. This work explores the fatal story of Petra Kelly, a German activist, pacifist and founder of the German Green Party (Die Grünen) and the former general Gert Bastian.
Kelly and Bastian seemed an unlikely pair, him being twenty-five years her senior and with a military career and a background in the Wehrmacht, the armed forces of Nazi Germany. Despite extensive public and media attention on their partnership and political engagement, they became increasingly isolated with Kelly growing disconcertingly dependent on Bastian. In 1992, the story of this German power couple came to an abrupt end with two gunshots. The police found Kelly and Bastian killed in their home, and the investigation indicated that in all likelihood, Bastian had first shot the sleeping Kelly and then himself. The ‘double death’ of Kelly and Bastian was commemorated by the Green Party, ignoring the possibility of Bastian being a murderer. Accom- panied by the unusual pairing of their glamorous public careers and extreme isolation, their deaths caused not only public bewilderment, but also their subsequent fall into oblivion.
Inside the darkened installation Lethal Love, where scent dispensers fill the air with flower and gunpowder, one is repeatedly hit by bright and moving spotlights, which are only partially screened out by the venetian blinds. The installation thus establishes a physical situation that refers to the couple’s juggling of their prominent public image and their private and dark secret leading to their deaths.
Excerpt from the publication Lingering Nous, published by Centre Pompidou, Paris and Les presses du réel, Dijon, 2017
Borrowing its title from the German feminist Alice Schwarzer’s book [1] Lethal Love lingers on the story of Petra Kelly (1947–1992) and Gert Bastian (1923–1992), a couple bound by extraordinary political engagement despite their differences. Kelly was a founding member of the German Green Party and Bastian, a Wehrmacht volunteer, former German general, and later, an unexpected hero of the Peace Movement. Their unlikely encounter and intense companionship in politics ended with an unforeseen and unsolved gunshot, apparently by Bastian, revealing a striking contrast between their extremely public life of progressive politics and shielded private life. Activating an experimental template of learning and unlearning of the narratives of historical figures and their events, the stark and confrontational doubling and canceling of each other is translated as an abstract spatial interplay of blinds, mirror, and lights.
Stretched diagonally across the space, a mirror wall bisects the gallery diago- nally and asymmetrically, the zone behind the wall remaining empty and dark, yet filled with the scent of wildflowers and gunpowder to provoke one’s olfactory sense. Perforated gunmetal Venetian blinds occupy the first half, with a strong spotlight directed exactly toward the cen- ter of a growing branch structure, where the imagery of blinds becomes doubled. While this spotlight slowly breathes on and off, two moving lights draw prism-like lighting effects in tangential movements from each side.
[1] Alice Schwarzer, Eine tödliche Liebe (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2001).
Related Press
Lethal Love - Andrew Bonacina
view pdf document
Exhibition History
Double Soul, SMK – Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2022
Triple Vita Nestings, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand, 2018
Triple Vita Nestings, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia, 2018
Superposition, Biennale of Sydney, Museum of Contemporary Art, Brisbane, Australia, 2018
Lethal Love, Cubitt, London, UK, 2008
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