The Peasants 1927 (after Malevich)
by Alexandra Hopf imagines a collaboration between the contemporaries Kazimir Malevich and Bertolt Brecht in Berlin in the year 1927. Visualized within the exhibition space SH( )P.
The title also refers to the eponymous fictional play published in the accompanying Program Booklet, which appears alongside historical source texts, images of costumes, a sewing pattern, and an insert that forms part of the exhibition. Within it, the performance takes place ,quite literally, within the imagination.
Malevich had a major retrospective in Berlin at that time. At the same moment, he was fleeing from the Soviet regime, hoping for a professorship in Dessau and to establish himself in Berlin. In his paintings, he addressed the plight of the peasants . A theme that runs through his entire oeuvre. As well as the loss of their traditional structures through industrialization and forced collectivization under Stalinism. His blocklike, metallically shimmering figures embody the transition from the human to the mechanical.
Against this historical backdrop, the peasants in Hopf’s work step out of history and into the real space of the exhibition. What emerges is a constellation reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s concept of the dialectical image: a moment in which past and present «flash up to form a constellation.»
Hopf also draws on Giorgio Agamben’s notion of the contemporary as a form of distance from the present. To be contemporary means to be «untimely.» In this sense, The Peasants 1927 brings the avant-garde discourses of the 1920s - Brecht’s epic theater and Malevich’s painting and theory - into a renewed encounter.
A performative element of the exhibition is a staged reading, in which Alexandra Hopf and actress Lisa–Katrina Mayer take on roles from the fictional play The Peasants 1927, thereby delineating the stage space within the exhibition itself. Here, the socalled «fourth wall», the boundary between stage and audience , also appears, awaiting its breakthrough.
