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“Es will mir nicht aus dem Sinn”

Tazro Niscino

One of Cologne's most prominent monuments, the statue of Wilhelm II on horseback, on the Hohenzollern Bridge directly on the Rhine, is remodeled for the duration of the exhibition. A staircase leads into a comfortable room where the Emperor looks out from the floor as a bust. The monument becomes a decorative object in a living room, a private sculpture. Tazro Niscino alias Tatsurou Bashi has already realized several projects that involved reversing proportions of height and dimensions and at least pulling that which is "on top" in the hierarchy down to an everyday level, or rather elevating everyday life. "Queen Victoria", a public monument in Liverpool, was remodeled so that the statue ended up in a provisional hotel room. Her grandson Wilhelm II von Hohenzollern, the last emperor of the German Empire, undergoes a similar fate. The monument of Wilhelm was erected between 1907 and 1911.

The reign of Wilhelm II (1888-1918) was marked by, among other things, the first wave of immigration due to the phase of high industrialization since the founding of the Empire (1871). In the 1880s, as the demand for workers in the German mining industry and heavy industries rose to new heights, other areas of employment followed. Immigration policies were oriented to a keen observation of Polish immigration from Austro-Hungary and Russia, with the aim of forestalling the immigration of so-called "enemies of the Empire"; a suspension period in winter only applied to them. In a second point, however, the reign of Wilhelm II was also marked by Germany's colonial activities, and finally by World War I. The cozy atmosphere of Niscino's room invites visitors to a historic encounter with this figure from the past. Not least of all, here one could conduct an imaginary conversation about the continuities of xenophobia, colonialism and migration.

Artist, born 1960, lives and works in Cologne.

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Taszro Niscino