Installation with wood, ladder, metal plate, margarine, hare fur, cassette recorder
Overall dimensions variable


One could say that German director, performance artist, and filmmaker Christoph Schlingensief began his artistic career as a child when he first began making short films. By his early twenties, he was collaborating with other young German artists, always playing the role of the provocateur and creating cinematic works that would influence German cultural and political discourse for decades. After discovering he had lung cancer in early 2008, Schlingensief’s work changed focus: he practice, which up to this point had been chaotic, humorous, and subversive, turned inwards in an examination of mortality. 

Hase Fett, first shown at Christoph Schlingensief’s 2008 Fluxus-Oratoria Eine Kirche der Angst vor dem Fremden in mir (A Church of Fear vs. the Alien Within) and later as part of the Church of Fear at the 2011 Venice Biennale, is an unmistakable homage to another exceptional and divisive German artist: Joseph Beuys. The work, in which the skin of a hare is thickly doused in fat and attached to a cheap corner of wood, spotlighted by a single bare lightbulb, was placed in one corner of the “church.” For thirty cents congregants could purchase a votive candle as an offering. Beuys, who used both fat and hares in many of his works, placed significance on both of these seemingly unexceptional entities. The hare, Beuys once remarked, has a long-held symbolic significance, ranging from fertility to the resurrection. The fat, in the myth recounted by Beuys as to its significance, saved his life when nomadic Tartar tribesmen rescued him after after his warplane was shot down in Crimea in 1944. According to his account, the tribesmen, who were never found, wrapped him in fat and felt to keep him warm. Here, Schlingensief draws on this compelling narrative to make symbolic enquiries into his own inevitable early death and longing for rescue. – Alicia Reuter


*1960 in Oberhausen, Germany | † 2010 in Berlin, Germany