Work
"War Years"
Elmar Hess, who has an outwardly apparent similarity to the U.S. actor Orson Welles, directed his artistic debut work in 1996. In his film "War Years", he styled a relationship crisis, a World War II.
A huge kitchen table turns into a battlefield on which quarreling lovers, staged in allusion to the meeting between Winston Churchill (Hess mimes) and Adolf Hitler.
Like many details in a surreal film event, the film is to be experienced from the narrative perspective of a large model ship that is involved in the turmoil of war. The film focuses on the media handling of the serious German heritage, breaking taboos: images and sounds, figures, landscapes and architecture of the Nazi dictatorship and World War II fade into the storyline of the film with a character of many.
In almost playful manner Nazi and Allied war strategies are identified as historical fund with scenes from a private relationship clinch. The relationship drama put the "War Years " as a tableau of social landscape in a soulless world: People are pressed into the intellectual cross transitions of serious seeming commentary voices and appear involved in the gluttonous machinery of a war that is raging in the vacuum between the social, historical and collateral relations.
"Freedom is not for free"
In Hess' installation "Freedom is not for free" from 2006, the theme of his work is similar to "War Years", ending a conflict of love in front of the tribunal of a human rights committee. The case is a troubadour of grotesque stereotypes and behavior against better knowledge. Behind the individual drama the work traces a vision of society in which the fulfillment of human aspirations through lobbying and manipulation is prevented by the media.
As in most current work of Elmar Hess video sequences like in "Freedom is not for free" are in the center of his installation in which objects, photographs and records of private origin are connected with historical events. The battle of the sexes mutates into the confrontation between the two superpowers during the Cold War. Acting as historical figures acquaintances were kit out by Hess before he photographed them in known poses. Treating his friends ironically deceptively similar, Hess overstates politicians such as John F. Kennedy, Che Guevara, Mao Tse-tung, Willy Brandt and other prominent partners of the policy of the Iron Curtain. In his productions he refers repeatedly to the "wild" 1960s, in which he sees sexual taboos coded by power struggles in social dimension.
