An interview with Michal Kosakowski | Deutsche Welle, April 5, 2012

Murder, mayhem, violence: Where do such fantasies originate? A conversation with film-maker Michal Kosakowski, who made normal people act out fantasies they usually keep under wraps. A glimpse into the interior life of people just like you and me.

For more than 15 years Viennese film-maker Michal Kosakowski has been dealing with fantasies of murder and mayhem in a number of art projects. He interviewed people about whether and how they would kill somebody and then gave them the opportunity to act out these fantasies on videos – as perpetrators or victims. His many years of dealing with the subject first led to the widely publicised video installation “Fortynine” in which viewers are exposed to the simultaneous onslaught of hundreds of murder videos and, eventually, to a film that juxtaposes these murder fantasies with interviews in which the participants comment on them. The title “Zero Killed” is programmatic, however: as far as we know, none of the participants has ever committed a felony in reality. And yet the film affords alarming insights into the inner life of so-called normal people. Read the rest of this page »

by Olaf Przybilla | Press review | Sueddeutsche Zeitung, March 31, 2012

Death must be at home in Vienna: At the Erlanger Kunstpalais artists enquire after fantasies of blood and the images in one’s own mind.

The exhibition ‘Töten’ (‘Killing’) at the Erlanger Kunstpalais is best explored backwards, downside up, so to say: first down to the basement of the house, to the last exhibition space of the Palais that was established two years ago, right on the city’s most representative square. An art palace, complete with public library, in a medium-sized town – not exactly the place in which one would expect to be confronted with downright disturbing art. Yet that is precisely what one finds in Erlangen, and nowhere more nightmarish than in the exhibition’s last room in which 12 artists deal with one and the same subject – killing.

Down to the basement then. This is where Michal Kosakowski shows his video installation ‘Do You Have Murder Fantasies?’, less a work in the classic sense than some sort of epic. It takes time to unravel the Viennese artist’s visual conundrum. Those who do are likely to sleep uneasily but not to regret their efforts. It would take six hours to see every single scene of the installation, and at least two hours to form an impression of a work that is a visual maelstrom.

When entering the room, one is at first faced by what looks like utter chaos, a twitching kaleidoscope of 49 films. One immediately suspects that they show terrifying things, yet at first that is all. There is sound, but it takes a while before one realizes that it comes from only one of the films at a time. Successively, one thus concentrates on the soundtrack that goes with one of the squares, while the 48 others display killing in various sorts and manners. Read the rest of this page »