Vernissage 27.03.2025 |
28.03.2025 - 10.05.2025

NICHOLAS WARBURG | Aktenzeichen XY Unerlöst Solo Exhibition

The ZDF series Aktenzeichen XY ungelöst (Case File XY Unsolved) is the world’s longest-running true-crime television format. Since its first broadcast in 1967, over five thousand cases have been featured, nearly one in three involving murder. At its peak in the old Federal Republic of Germany, more than half the population tuned in. Viewers were called upon to assist the police when investigations stalled – often leading to breakthroughs. But solving crimes was not the show’s only effect. Perpetrators were sometimes cast in a racist light; at other times, they appeared without history, as if emerging from nowhere, evil. Denunciation flourished once again, and an aggressive climate of suspicion pervaded society: danger lurked everywhere. Thus, in the dim glow of flickering living rooms, a German Angstlust – a morbid thrill of fear – merged with simmering resentment and the comforting identification with victims. After all, only a few decades earlier, millions had found themselves on the other side, in the role of perpetrators.

In Nicholas Warburg’s first solo exhibition at Galerie Judith Andreae, Aktenzeichen XY ungelöst becomes Aktenzeichen XY unERlöst (Case File XY Unredeemed). Not only does Germany’s reckoning with its past seem to have largely failed – its ghosts have returned. The term »Hauntology« , coined by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in the early 1990s, fuses »haunting« with »ontology«, the study of being. It describes the feeling of being haunted by historical possibilities that never came to pass. In Warburg’s work, the Thousand-Year Reich appears as such a nostalgia for lost futures.

Nicholas Warburg (*1992, Frankfurt a. M.) explores the ambivalences of German history and art history in his work. He studied at the California Institute of the Arts and the Städelschule Frankfurt. His works have been presented at Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, Kunstmuseum Marburg, Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, and Kunstraum Potsdam.