Prinz Gholam

Prinz Gholam: My Sweet Country (Olympieion) (2017)

In the video My Sweet Country (Olympieion) (2017) by the German/Libanese artist duo Prinz Gholam (Wolfgang Prinz, *1969 and Michel Gholam*1963), their performance-oriented work interlaces the two exhibition sites of documenta 14, Athens and Kassel, and makes reference to the present and the past, art history and history. Similar to tableaux vivants, various scenes drawn from historical sources are re-enacted through gestures and constellations in decelerated poses. The artists employ this corporeal-gestural, non-verbal language to illustrate appropriated gestures and relations. By internalizing these gestures as citations, they simultaneously question their own identity. In My Sweet Country (Olympieion) Prinz Gholam re-enact Eugène Delacroix’s historical painting Entry of the Crusaders in Constantinople from 1804. The film is based on the artists’ live performances in Olympieion, in which Prinz Gholam interpret almost all of the numerous figures featured in the painting.