Duisburg
In her three-channel video installation Leute wie wir (“People Like Us”) the artist Peggy Buth investigates the historical circumstances and implications based on the business culture of Friedrich Krupp AG that have had a formative influence on a broad range of social relations in the Ruhr region, from private life to urban spaces. This work, which was shown for the first time in 2017 at the Museum Folkwang in Essen, is one section of her broader composition Vom Nutzen der Angst – The Politics of Selection, from which the installation at the Ruhrtriennale takes its title. Here the Berlin-born artist examines “the links between the construction of identity, media, economics, the myth of the worker and the capitalist appropriation of space” (Peggy Buth).
For its presentation at the Ruhrtriennale 2018 Peggy Buth will augment her existing video installation with a second work, created especially for the festival. This widens its scope to include practices of identity formation that accured in the Ruhr region representing the local working culture and offering an insight into a tradition that is about to vanish with the end of coal mining. Peggy Buth presents both works in the St. Barbara church in Duisburg-Rheinhausen, de- consecrated in 2011, that was constructed in the early 1960s on the premises of the Rheinhausen AG coal and steel works. It stands in the middle of a workers’ housing estate, very close to the site where the industrial disputes of the late 1980s began that provide one of the central motifs of the artist’s video work.
Peggy Buth, who has held the position of Professor of Media Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig since 2016, works in a conceptual and process-orientated manner in a wide range of media (including film, photography, sculpture and assemblage). She often presents her works in the form of large spatial installations that impressively reinforce the complex links between her themes. This will also be the case in St. Barbara’s church whose history and form will make it a “speaking” part of the installation
Concept: Peggy Buth
Artistic Director: Britta Peters, Urbane Künste Ruhr