About the Work
Pictures which should not exist: Dierk Schmidt's nineteen-part history picture SIEV-X "Zu einem Fall verschärfter Flüchtlingspolitik" (On a Case of Tightened Refugee Policy) is a political statement and reflection on the possibilities of political painting. The work shows a case of failure to give assistance and disastrous refugee policy from 2001 and links him with a main work of European history painting: Théodore Géricault's 'Raft of the Medusa' of 1819. In both cases the painting replaces non-existent public pictures, in other words, press pictures which were intentionally suppressed. Schmidt's painting is the result of an investigative process. The death of hundreds of boat people was knowingly accepted and the incident is strikingly similar, both aesthetically and politically, to the gruesome events following the shipwreck of the French frigate 'Medusa' in 1816. At the same time, a completely new narrative method was introduced in the making of the painting: transparent or black films and the fragmentation of the subject of the picture. The viewer must create a meaningful version of the story from the nineteen parts of the work.
