BERLIN.- KÖNIG GALERIE is presenting ASBEST, the first exhibition by Biennale artist, Ersan Mondtag, with the gallery. Revisiting the historical themes of his “Monument of an Unknown Man” from Venice, Mondtag shifts his focus to the tangible and physical. His highly acclaimed “memory arch” in the German Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale, curated by Çağla Ilk, brought the untold stories of Turkish guest workers to life through a spectacular installation. With sculptures, objects, and artifacts in miniature rooms and a multi-layered live performance over three floors, Mondtag recreated the biography of his grandfather, Hasan Aygün, as an exemplary portrait of European labor migration. In the early 1960s, alongside nearly four million other guest workers, Aygün came to West Germany in support of the country’s so-called “economic miracle” and subsequently died from a lung disease contracted while working with asbestos in a factory before he was able to retire. His life – marked by 28 years of hard work and personal fulfillment – unfolded between the pursuit of a better future and a tragic end caused by poor occupational safety standards.

The exhibition, ASBEST, delves deeper into both the personal and collective narratives of this overlooked generation who worked for both their own as well as Germany’s prosperity. The show, featuring many new works, focuses on the life of Hasan Aygün and his gradual process of assimilation, where the foreign land inevitably became a second home.

Among the new pieces is a series of 28 busts entitled, “The Unknown Man”, showing the gradual changes in Aygün’s face over the years. The first sculpture, embodying the year 1962, previously shown in the German Pavilion at the “Werkstatt”, as well the final sculpture, number 28, showing the last year of Aygün’s working life, are both presented in St. Agnes. In addition, a third bust, number 14, marking the midpoint of Aygün’s working life, conveys a moment when the transformations wrought by the laboring body have already become evident. With this form of sculptural representation, which was historically reserved for those “deserving” subjects of the upper classes, Mondtag presents his viewpoint as a kind of historical correction, reflected in both the title and design of the original show in Venice.

The exhibition weaves a composition of fateful events through a host of new works. It contrasts the poetics of Aygün’s family life with the harsh bureaucratic and medical realities that shaped it. Mondtag transforms X-ray images of his grandfather’s lungs into sculptural evidence of the invisible threats that he faced in his lifetime, in a work where X-ray images are superimposed onto granite-like slabs made by ETERPLAN, the company where Aygün spent his entire working life. This transfer references both the conditions of a singular life and the art historical conditions of the post-war period, when non-representational art blossomed in the context of a deliberate refusal to confront the concrete horrors of both past and present. In an elaborate process, photographic motifs are burned into these panels via laser, effectively penetrating its surface, the images transforming the industrial material into a lasting, materially charged form of memory.

Video works documenting the performative ritual of life in “Monument of an Unknown Man” from Venice, also form a crucial part of ASBEST, along with the staging of German bureaucratic communication and other such documents. In this way, the exhibition sets a striking and nuanced contrast to contemporary discourses on the migration of people from one culture to another.

– Text by Till Briegleb