Thomas Eller
The White Male Complex #14, 2022
Video, single channel, 4:3, 20’ 33”
About the Works
In his new work, made especially for You Know That You Are Human @ POINTS of RESISTANCE V, Thomas Eller tackles the complexities of the most singularly human of endeavours – religion and philosophy. Manipulating image and sound until they both are practically unreadable, his reading of an obscure text by an (in)famous character from Eller’s native town is a repudiation of dogmas of any kind, an act of resistance against blind belief. This work forms the latest in Thomas Eller’s ongoing series of artworks, begun in 2011, entitled The White Male Complex.
ARTIST STATEMENT
The work is a reading of various parts of the book "Das Paradies der Liebe" (The Paradise of Love) by Johann Baptist Schad who was born 1758 in my village, Mürsbach. He became a Benedictine monk, defected after anonymously writing a scathing report about the bigotry of the Catholic church at the time. He converted to Protestantism and became a professor of philosophy in Jena under the mentorship of Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Later he was recommended by Goethe as philosophy professor in Charkiw, Ukraine, where he lived and worked for 16 years. The text splinters read by me are witness to a rebellious mind that challenged social and cultural injustices inflicted on humanity by orthodoxy, greed, dumbness and cruelty.
About the Artist
Thomas Eller is an artist and curator. He lives and works in Mürsbach and Berlin.
Eller started his career in Berlin. From 1990 until today he has been exhibiting extensively in galleries and museums in Europe, Asia and the Americas. From 1995 until 2004 he was living in New York. Returning to Berlin, he founded the online art magazine artnet.de and served as editior-in-chief and executive manager from 2004 to 2008. In 2008 and 2009 Eller was executive director and artistic director of Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin. In 2014 he moved to Beijing. Also in 2014 he co-curated the exhibition “The 8 of paths” with 23 Beijing-based artists in Berlin. In 2017 he founded the Gallery Weekend Beijing. Since 2014 he has been president of RanDian magazine. More recently (2019-21) Eller served as artistic director of the Taoxichuan CHINA ARTS & SCIENCES project in Jingdezhen, the porcelain capital of the world in the Jiangxi province, and was recently an associate researcher at Tsinghua University in Beijing. In 2020 he returned to Germany and started developing an old water mill in Mürsbach, Franconia, as a center for international arts fuelled by green energy.
Since 2011, Eller has been working on a series of various artworks under the title “The White Male Complex”, of which the current new work, made for this exhibition, is a part.