I just got back home from a visit to the Hamburger Bahnhof. Taking advantage of their fantastic free Thursdays, I went to see the exhibition “Schmerz”.
If you can call it an exhibition. Edu-tainment would be a more appropriate name. At first it looked promising, a big box like structure built in the middle of the center hall with text in black and white about pain that made me expect all kind of fantastic art. However, there was hardly any art at all. The exhibition consists of semi- educational texts about all kinds of aspects of pain, medical gear, patients descriptions of their pains, a disproportionally big section devoted to the pain of Christ during crucifixion, an autopsy report, a couple of police files, all this interspersed with a couple of art videos. And two installations. And even those were nothing we haven´t seen before and not really put in relation with the rest of the exhibited material. No new work, nothing exciting, obviously no real connection made between art and pain. In my opinion this is the shallowest, most boring, politically correct and utterly superfluous exhibition I have seen in Hamburger Bahnhof. In a city that claims to be the centre of the art world this is a joke. And a waste of money.
If you want to go and see the exhibition, go on a thursday afternoon, it´s free.