Heiner Goebbels. The Human Province

A man exits the theatre, walks to the curb, gets into a car and drives home. In the sound and video installation “The Human Province”, we listen to and observe this man over a period of ten years doing the same ritual in nearly 50 cities in 25 countries. While driving through these cities, he describes his view of society based on passages taken from Elias Cannetti’s book “The Human Province”. The main character in the sound and video installation of the same name by composer/director Heiner Goebbels is played by the French actor André Wilms. The long-term project has been presented for the first time as a multimedia sculpture at the Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau. The work is comprised of 54 successive film sequences featuring a polyphonic sound composition based on the soundscapes of the cities. The key motifs of the installation include listening, seeing, repetition, aging and the relationship between the individual and public space.
With its Old Masters’ Picture Gallery and the Albertinum, Dresden boasts a rich art-historical tradition, yet there are just a few exhibition venues for contemporary art. The organisers hope that the exhibition “The Human Province” in the Lipsiusbau in downtown Dresden will anchor such a venue more firmly in the public sphere. In this way, the Dresden State Art Collections continued building on the progress made by the William Forsyth exhibition previously staged at the same venue, and encourage further interdisciplinary discourse on contemporary art.

Artist: Heiner Goebbels
Curator: Hartwig Fischer
Project team: Hilke Wagner, Gwendolin Kremer, Mathias Wagner