The summer of 2021 the postponed Olympic Games will take place in Tokyo. The most televised event in the world will highjack the collective imagination of spectators around the globe. It is 49 years after the Munich Massacre, known as “Black September”, the kidnapping, execution and massacre of the Israeli Olympic team by members of the terrorist group Black September at the XX Olympiad in Munich. It is also the 20th anniversary of the work Black September by Christoph Draeger, on display at AB7: ECLIPSE. One of the most iconic contemporary artworks, Black September is a detailed restaging of the dormitory of the hostages. This realistic rendering of the tragic events has many layers of meaning, which transcend its harsh and macabre realism. The event itself was a real-time televised global event years before the September 11, 2011, attacks whose tenth anniversary will be commemorated this year. The Munich kidnappers were able to watch on their own TV set the clumsy efforts of the German police and evade them accordingly. News can alter the course of history the very minute it is being written. Being in Athens, the audience of the Biennale has been raised under the awe and threat of the actions of terrorist organisations such as 17 November and ELA (People’s Struggle). Urban terror is a phenomenon that has not been reduced in the slightest; on the contrary, it is becoming a lingering threat that conditions contemporary subjects in a constant state of anxiety, policing and fear. Black September is a monument, not of a single tragic incident only, but of the many horrific incidents that mark our contemporary collective conscience.

Black September, 2003
Mixed media
Courtesy of the artist and Lokal 30, Warsaw
With the support of the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia

Black September, 2003
Synchronised two channel video installation, mixed media, 14’33’’
Courtesy of the artist and Lokal 30, Warsaw
With the support of the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia