Liberty City, 2007

Video

Liberty City addresses a standard historical scene: On the night of December 17, 1979, the black motorcyclist Arthur McDuffie was stopped by white)cops on the corner of North Miami Avenue and 38th Street. He was abused so severely that he died from his injuries a few days later. When the accused policemen were acquitted five months later, Liberty City exploded. It was the darkest moment in the history of Miami. Desolate Liberty City haunts voyeuristic reality TV series in emulation of Homicide. Friedl inverts the dramatic structure: In the scene staged and filmed on site, the (white) cop is the victim. The film was shot in the streets of the Liberty Square Housing Project, a residential complex built during the Roosevelt era in the 1930s for African American residents. To keep the black and white populations separated, a wall was erected on the eastern boundary of Liberty Square, the remains of which can still be seen today. Friedl’s short, uncut loop is a tribute to the community of Liberty City—epic theater in the genre of documentary aesthetics.

Video, color, sound
1:11 min., aspect ratio 4:3, loop
Edition of 3 + 1 AP

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Peter Friedl

**Everyone is a conspiracy theorist, 2023**

**The Dramatist (Anne, Blind Boy, Koba), 2016**

**The Dramatist (Black Hamlet, Crazy Henry, Giulia, Toussaint), 2013**

Biography

Peter Friedl is a classic of contemporary art. The three-time documenta participant, born in 1960, can be considered a notorious participant in discourse - because his work has always understood how to address major themes in such a way that they found and find new forms away from the canon and mainstream. Forms that run counter to power and domination, subvert them, escape them.... and confront them in the process. Friedl takes away from history - for example colonialism or modernity, its paradigms and institutions - the power to define what is connected and how, and with an almost innocent-seeming aesthetic he tells a different story about humans and historical actions than we are used to and may find opportune. Peter Friedl provokes that which dominates us, including our own thinking. Throughout the years he his work has been displayed in meaningful solo exhibitions, most recently Teatro Popular (KOW Berlin, 2023), Report 1964-2022 (KW Berlin 2022) and No Prey, No Pay (Guido Costa Projects Turin, 2021) and major group exhibitions such as Life, Without Buildings, Gta exhibitions (ETH Zurich 2022), Das Auto rosi aber (KOW Berlin 2022) and Komunikazion - Inkomunikazio (Tabakalera, Centre for Contemporary Art, San Sebastian 2021).

Full Biography

Exhibitions at KOW