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© David Lieske
VI, VII is pleased to announce “Armed Interpretation,” an exhibition of new works by German artist David Lieske.
At the center of David Lieske’s exhibition is the photographic reproduction of the German machine gun type 08/15. First developed in 1908 and improved in 1915, the automatic gun was the weapon of choice of the German Army during the First World War. A derivate of American inventor Hiram Maxim’s “classic” machine gun, which was at the time of its invention advertised as “The World’s Standard,” the name 08/15 entered German colloquial use as a description of something that is so standard that it is dull.
The MG 08/15 is indeed also the origin of another notoriously German institution: The DIN-standard, which was first applied in 1918 to a machine part of the gun, subsequently issued industrial norms for all kinds of objects, ranging from paper sizes to table heights (according to the German Institute for Standardisation, there are over 33.500 DIN-standards today), thereby brilliantly illustrating the somewhat clichéd notion of a German post-war civil society that, albeit no longer beset by the death drive of its past militarist ambitions, is yet filled to the brim with military values and their norms. In
“Armed Interpretation,” Lieske traces the symbolic transformation of a killing machine to the societal automation of boredom.
David Lieske
Emerging onto the German art scene with his inclusion in the exhibition “Formalismus. Moderne Kunst, heute” curated by Yilmaz Dziewior at Hamburg Kunstverein in 2004, David Lieske made his institutional debut at the tender age of twenty-four. Since then his work has explored connections between social and historical circumstances with power, personal desire and identity through image-making, sculpture and conceptual photo-based works.
Throughout, he has initiated of a wide variety of projects that have allowed him to live other lives and wear other hats as a DJ, musician, gallerist, editor and designer: co-founding Hamburg based DIAL records in 1999 and Berlin/New York based Mathew Gallery from 2012-2018.