Rudolf Herz : Lenin on Tour

In 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the city council in Dresden decided to remove its statue of Lenin, a symbol of the no longer existent Communist regime. The monument was taken down and given to a Swabian stonemason. In the summer of 2004, Rudolf Herz borrowed this enormous torso of Lenin and placed it, along with two other anonymous statues, on the back of a truck and drove them all over Europe. Each evening the truck would stop in a different city where artists, sociologists, cultural scientists, economists and common people on the streets were asked to give their views on Lenin in the twenty-first century: l show Lenin to my contemporaries. And the 21st century to Lenin. Who will explain it to him? This remarkable tour was recorded by a film team and by photographers Reinhard Matz and Irena Wunsch. The resulting images, along with statements from a variety of witnesses form the basis of the Lenin on Tour project, which has taken shape as a documentary film, an exhibition, and now in the form of this book. Rudolf Herz, born in 1954 in Sonthofen, is a conceptual artist concerned with questions of public memory and oblivion. Herz has exhibited widely and received numerous awards. He lives in Munich and Paris.

Featured in the May 2012 Creative Enterprises newsletter.
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