This year’s winner of the Käthe-Kollwitz-Preis, Eran Schaerf, has developed for his exhibition “Disorder of Appearance” an installation entitled Panorama for the Akademie der Künste. The work takes news images from the internet as its point of departure. Schaerf investigates their theatrical strategies, and how the medium has become a stage where politics is produced as a piece of theatre. He converts textual and pictorial news into something three-dimensional, transforms texts into something audible, materialises images, and investigates the media-related aspects of contexts and shifts in meanings. A variety of materials and mediums are used: text, speech, photography, film and radio drama together form a whole which opens up a panorama of different views to the observer, with insight also in store where possible. “A Panorama news is multi-perspective, polyphonic, constructed almost as a dialogue, in order to set truth in the context of another possible narration.” (Eran Schaerf)

Eran Schaerf, born in Tel Aviv-Jaffa in 1962, has been living and working in Berlin since 1985. He studied architecture at ORT in Giv’atayim (Israel) and the Berlin University of the Arts, was head of the Department of Fine Arts at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht and currently teaches at the Zurich University of the Arts.
The artist has received awards and scholarships from institutions including the Akademie der Künste, Berlin (1999), the state of Baden-Württemberg (1999) and the Deutschen Akademie der darstellenden Künste for the 2002 Radio Play of the Year. His work has been exhibited at such events as the 54th Venice Biennale (2011), the Skulptur Projekte Münster (2007) and Manifesta 2 in Luxemburg (1998).