In the past Althea Thauberger has collaborated closely with various social communities to create performance based video and photographic works. Her work usually involves an extended period of research and development where the artist strives to reveal socio-political constructions imbedded within the broad dynamics of a given group consciousness. Essential to Thauberger’s process is an element of shared responsibility, collaboration and dialogue where the participants in each project contribute a measure of personal subjectiveness to the final product. She has worked together with teenage actresses to write a modern operetta about a drowned pet dog; U.S. military wives to commission original autobiographical musical compositions; and a troupe of Canadian tree-planters to enact and film an epic allegory about death, consciousness and re-birth. Among many other references her works engage in a kind of Brechtian discourse around radical absurdity and breaks with escapist representation, group psychology and the distribution of authority and leadership.

Thauberger’s latest project was produced in collaboration with eight young German men during a yearlong artist residency at the Kuenstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. All of the men, ages 18 – 22, are participating in Zivildienst – a program created by the government in the 1960’s to allow those that “conscientiously object to carrying a weapon” the ability to fulfill their military service obligation through social work. Typically, these young men provide labor in hospitals, nursing homes, kindergartens or other social programs – significantly supplementing the government’s social welfare system. Thauberger made an official agreement with the Zivildienst authority to allow these young civil servants to “serve” in the context of an art project. Over the course of 3 1/2 months Thauberger worked closely with the Zivis, engaging in improvisational exercises and holding bi-weekly meetings to discuss issues such as the Zivildienst system and military service, national identity, work ethics and personal/autobiographical concerns. The realization of the project was a performance the young men created through a series of stylized postures or vignettes where the archetypal metaphors of an “alienated” community are depicted within a large architectural set made of scaffolding.

On view at the gallery will be a series of color portraits of the Zivis (as they chose to be portrayed) accompanied by fictional autobiographies they wrote as one of Thauberger’s exercises, a large group portrait of the young men “boxed in” by the pictures parameters (designed for the cover of a catalog documenting the project) and a black & white image of the empty set. Projected In a separate room will be an 18-minute video of the Zivis performing the series of postures they choreographed to portray a narrative arc of isolation, despair, idealism, co-operation, betrayal and endurance, using themselves as the protagonists.