In 2003 the German artist Thomas Kilpper welded a horse out of scrap metal together with a group of young people in the West Bank. All the materials they used originated from destroyed houses and cars from the everlasting violent conflict devastating the area. The film AL HISSAN tells the story about the making of this simple horse, an Arabic symbol for freedom, but indirectly also show us something about the suppressing conditions under which these people live and strive. Art cannot solve these conflicts course, but it should always demand a debate on central social questions and conflicts, and insist on an improvement of the social situation in the sense of emancipatory developments, Kilpper says in an interview about the project. In the film one of the soldiers jokes about the sculpture potentially being a Trojan one. He couldn't be more right. Not in terms of it concealing a violent force, but something very different but still from inside and out. Sympathy as force. Empathy as a poetics.

Bio

Thomas Kilpper is an artist who preferably works site-related and with a wide range of media - installation, sculpture, printmaking , photography, video. He studied Fine Arts at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Nurnberg, Dusseldorf and Frankfurt on Main/Städel; he lives and works in Berlin and Bergen. Kilppers art-projects are known for interfering into different fields of social issues and conflicts. Since 2006 he is running the independent gallery space after the butcher in Berlin.

Solo projects include: Fragments from Cologne, Nagel Draxler Gallery, Cologne, 2020, A Lighthouse for Lampedusa!, Bozar, Museum for Contemporary Art, Brussel 2016, Contemporary Footprints, National Gallery Oslo 2015, SPEECH MATTERS, Pavilion for Revolutionary Free Speech, Danish Pavilion, 54 th Venice Biennale, 2011; State of Control, former Ministry for State Security (Stasi), Berlin (2009); .

Thomas Kilpper is represented by Nagel Draxler Gallery (Cologne/Berlin). He has been Professor of Fine Art with emphasis on printmaking at the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design at the University in Bergen.

www.kilpper-projects.net