At the heart of Declan Clarke's exhibition The Last Broadcast is his new film What Are the Wild Waves Saying?, which premieres here. The romantic title, which harks back to a mid-19th-century song imagining a dialogue between the famous Dickens siblings from his novel Dombey and Son, serves Clarke primarily as a metaphorical analogy between the waves of the sea and those of the radi.

In fact, the film tells a multi-layered and complex story of transition and transmission, of media influence, of surprising connections and certain historical parallels between a divided Ireland and an equally divided Germany, including the associated history of disinformation and espionage. With Stuart Ryan, a real character is the focus for the first time, who far surpasses its fictional predecessors from the artist's earlier films in terms of suspicious opacity and character ambiguit.

As some times before, Clarke works in this film in parallel in narrative and documentary mode and combines them with elements of the noir and espionage genre. Produced especially for the exhibition at the Kunstverein, the film is accompanied by an installation that weaves props, photos, texts and historical exhibits from a real but now closed broadcasting museum into a network rich in association.

Both the film and the installation make intense reference to the role of broadcasting in times of conflict, as it played it through the dissemination of political propaganda, particularly during World War II and the subsequent Cold War. As an Irishman living in Berlin, it was natural to explore these central themes through a range of historical connections between Ireland and German.

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also on view at the Foyer: Gill Gatfield: The Muses

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Native Tongue XR
a VR-sculpture
at public green Almstadt-/Rosa-Luxemburg-Straße until 10.4.22