All Inclusive
The audience looks into an exhibition space in which a museum pedagogue explains a small group of artworks. On display are realistic depictions of violence and abstractions, objects that only become art through acts of violence by the exhibition visitors, as well as remnants of real violence. Who has the right to utilize these works? The artist who conceived them or the persons who actually experienced the violence referred to here or who even paid for it with their lives?
This bitter comedy plays in the gray area between politically engaged art and exploitation of the suffering of others. All Inclusive is entertaining and uncomfortable, disturbing and aesthetically pleasing. Many artists – including Julian Hetzel himself – use conflicts and wars as raw material for works that are intended to shake up the viewer and provoke thought. At the same time, they make financial and social capital out of it. In fact, the sophisticated scenes of the piece play exactly on the threshold of the limit of pain of this moral dilemma.
Julian Hetzel was born in 1981 in the Black Forest (DE) and is currently based in Utrecht (NL). He works as director, performance maker, musician and visual artist. He develops pieces and installations through a docu-fictional approach that have a political dimension and which are at the intersection of theatre, music, and new media. Until 2008, he studied visual communication at the Bauhaus University in Weimar. After graduating, he continued his training at DasArts Graduate School, which is part of the Academy of Theatre and Dance of the Amsterdam University of the Arts. Between 2014 and 2016, Hetzel was Artist in Residence of the SPRING Festival for Performing Arts in Utrecht. Since 2017, his works have been co-produced by the CAMPO Arts Center in Gent, Belgium. He is co-founder of the electro-pop band Pentatones. Three of his works were invited for presentation at the Biennale in Venice in 2019. One of the works, Automated Sniper, had already been performed at Gessnerallee Zürich.
«Bitterly comical, cynical, and sometimes almost unbearable. Above all, however, unmasking, and that makes All Inclusive so explosive and potent: Julian Hetzel makes art and thereby also himself as an artist vulnerable.»
nachtkritik.de
«Hetzel eagerly uses the same strategies as the art practices he wants to criticize, but then spreads a wonderfully thick layer of satire over it...All Inclusive offers painfully recognizable scenes, where you have to laugh as often as you frown your brows. Hetzel unmasks the often too pompous intentions of art and sheds a critical light on the thin line between engagement and exploitation, including his own. The exit for the audience is – of course – through the gift shop.»
The Standart
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