Maya Schweizer / Clemens von Wedemeyer, „Nanjing Lu“, 2010
Using a draft of Erich Kettelhut
Lambda Print
71 x 61,4 cm
400€ (incl. VAT plus shipping costs)
The edition “Nanjing Lu” by Maya Schweizer (born 1976) and Clemens von Wedemeyer (born 1974) refers directly to their solo exhibition “Metropolis. Report from China” (2011) at the Frankfurter Kunstverein. It fuses two photographs: a high-rise view from Fritz Lang’s silent film classic “Metropolis” and a view of a nocturnal neon advertisement in contemporary Shanghai. At the centre of Swiss/Wedemeyer’s exhibition was a film artistic comparison of Lang’s utopia of the 1920s with a present-day communist system on the threshold of capitalist working conditions: How significant, for example, is the similarity between the architecture of Metropolis and Shanghai and how much utopia and how much dystopia is there in China? For the exhibition at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Schweizer/Wedemeyer have brought together numerous film historical photographs of Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” and photographs of the transformation of Chinese mega-cities.