Nine-channel video installation (transferred from Super 16 film), color, sound
51 min 58 sec (videos)
Overall dimensions variable
Produced with support of the BMW group and with help from the bavarian film fund FFF and ARRI film & tv, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary


Julian Rosefeldt's 9-screen installation asylum (2001/02) focuses on the unacknowledged practices of everyday work routines performed by migrant workers. In these tableaux groups of men and women are cast as players in scenes in which they perform in a Sisyphusian manner cycles of menial work that are never to be fulfilled. They are trapped in unusual and exotic locations that are never clearly identified but which are confined and confining, and where the characters perform an endless round of tasks that seem to have no lasting purpose. These characters represent asylum seekers, their situation accentuated by the theatricality of Rosefeldt's direction. In asylum the social position of the asylum seeker is revealed by the fantastic, poetic drama inherent in the theatricality of each scene.


*1965 Munich, Germany | Living and working in Berlin, Germany