Took a walk to the Kunsthalle here to see an exhibition called "Territories." Fully half of it is about the Israeli-occupied territories: the various Sharon plans, the settlements, the wall, the refugee camps. It's all very didactic and sad. The wall is obviously yet another land grab and the territories remaining to the Palestinians are pathetic little handfuls that any idiot can see will inevitably be settled by Israelis. It's divide and conquer. Room after room of videos and maps make it all pretty clear.
Other parts of the exhibition are about U.S.-restricted communities in the Southwest, bits of Antarctica, South Africa, and Afghanistan. It's not so much an art exhibit as a didactic, fairly one-sided polemic presented mainly through room after room of semi-washed-out projected videos. Not that I disagree with the politics, but is this the way to persuade and convince? Wouldn't a TV documentary be better?
The St. Peter's church here, a massive brick structure, is an odd mix of the austere and baroque. Most of the interior walls are elegant, white arches, as one would expect in a Northern church, but the altar is a golden fantasy, more common to Latin Catholic churches. A baptistery(?) has the remnants of weird ceiling paintings on it, images of a tangle of green vines covers the ceiling. In one area, the vines surround two men holding a cloth with an image of Christ's head. The green chaos is frightening, maybe a creepy vision of the dark world outside.
