Dark star

collage, 12 pieces, each 140 × 100 cm, entire length: 1680 × 100 cm, 2018 books, comics, scans, screenshots, sketches,photography, digital and analog prints Between 2014 and 2018 exhibitions and performances were taking place that evaluate, from an artistic viewpoint, the current consequences of the First World War and the globalizing effect on the occasion of the centenary of its outbreak and further course. Just like the works depicted, the contributions will illustrate aspects of a fundamental shift in the meaning of terms such as nature, material and creation on the basis of zombies and cyborgs – two figures characteristic of World War I. The genre of ‘Horror’ with its allegorical approach had served as a catalyst for collective traumas before and still does. There is a clear connection from Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ as a reaction to the devastated Europe by the Napoleon Wars to the new wave of ‘Torture Porns’ like ‘Saw’ after ‘9/11’ and ‘Guantanamo’ now. Borderlines with a military division, restricted areas and prohibited zones located in the desert or in the woods enhance this effect now more than ever. The cyborg and Sci-Fi movies on the other hand, already carrying within itself the original conflict between nature and machine, holds at the ready new potential in the post-humanistic discourse in the context of mythology and science.The so-called ‘Shell Shock Cinema’ established in Germany after 1918 expanded this approach to a global language. This first wave of ‘Horror’ and ‘Sci-Fi ’movies such a 'The Golem', ‘Nosferatu’, ‘The Cabinet of Dr.Caligari’ and ‘Metropolis’ among others can be regarded as an intellectual method to work up the experiences of the directors as soldiers in the trenches and the collective feed-back in the society after their return. The extended and ongoing collection of images and texts served the abovementioned exhibitions and performance as source material and by a further artistic process to produce a symbiosis between visual and textual material that attempts in a collage-like manner to zero in on the phenomenon of ‘Horror’ and ‘Sci-Fi’ in its actual correlation to war, collective crisis and mythology.