ERÖFFNUNG „Anstiftung zur Vorspiegelung wahrer Tatsachen“

In the organizer's words:

The solo exhibition by artist and filmmaker Juliane Jaschnow (*1989) entitled Anstiftung zur Vorspiegelung wahrer Tatsachen addresses the power of visual narratives and the instrumentalization of images and collective memory in the confrontation with contemporary Russia. In this context, the exhibition shows elements of the existing works Recapitulate (2019-2021) and With Friendly Applause (2023/2024) together with the newly developed installation Incitement to Fake True Facts (2025).

In her audiovisual installations, Juliane Jaschnow explores media narrative patterns with which Russia stages its role in the world and justifies its political actions. In doing so, she encounters principles of (re)construction and (re)staging, distorted images, copies, backdrops and the transfer of historical symbols into contemporary contexts. The artist dissects these principles by materializing pictorial objects, discursively shifting media contributions and their ideological charge and condensing them into expansive installations.

At the center of the work Recapitulate is a replica of the Berlin Reichstag erected by the Russian Ministry of Defense in the military patriotic leisure park Park Patriot near Moscow. In spring 2017, hundreds of extras reconstructed the iconic key scene of the Russian war commemoration - the storming of the Reichstag in May 1945 and the raising of the Soviet flag on the building. This re-enactment forms the starting point for Juliane Jaschnow's examination of the German-Russian culture of remembrance. The work, which includes a video installation, objects and print elements, focuses on collective images of history and memory, their identity-forming role and the importance of patriotic education.

The multi-part work "mit freundlichem Beifall" deals with the continuities of Russian propaganda productions and the mechanisms of disinformation and deception. It examines media spaces, forms and backgrounds of the representation of power - such as the newly designed curtains in the Kremlin's Representation Hall, where foreign state guests are received for television, among other things. At the same time, she looks back at a newspaper report from 1993 in which Putin advocates a "military dictatorship based on the Chilean model" for Russia.

In her new work, Incitement to the Pretence of True Facts, Juliane Jaschnow examines the progressive sacralization of Russian state power. For example, she examines the role of the Orthodox faith and shamanism in the ideological legitimization of the "special military operation" in Ukraine - and its embedding in a religious-nationalist narrative of sacrifice and heroism for Russia. She also looks at supernatural practices that are used as individual coping strategies in times of collective insecurity and warlike reality. Juliane Jaschnow's research processes a large volume of visual material from the Russian media into a multi-part installation consisting of props, mirror objects, teleprompters and videos. In a specially constructed mirror cabinet of optical illusions - a photo-multigraph - she negotiates the concepts of truth, lies, deception and illusion.