Mario Pfeifer: Black/White/Grey

Museum Folkwang, Essen, presents Mario Pfeifer’s new video installation Black/White/Grey.

In his latest video installation Black/White/Grey (2020) Mario Pfeifer investigates the relationship between hacking as political tool and the energy producing and distributing sector. During his research Pfeifer discussed different scenarios and situations with digital forensics, cyber-range instructors and in-the-field operators. Based on these conversations and site visits Pfeifer scripted a monologue for the German actress Sandra Borgmann to be performed in a virtual space that looks into different global key examples of hacking critical infrastructure such as electricity grid operators, power plants, refineries or multinationals’ websites. While the performer engages virtually with the audience on basic questions of data security, a digital forensic and hacker shares details on paradigm changing hacking attacks commonly known as industroyer, stuxnet or trisis. Black/White/Grey points out that such worm attacks indicate new territories of geopolitical conflicts fought in cyberspace. The artist raises the question if blackouts as a form of strategic political attacks have become a realistic thread to societies and nations.

Technology is deciding the fate of the world, and we are everywhere in its chains. (…)  For the past two decades I’ve covered the tech industry as a journalist, and I have been drawn most often to the issues of security and privacy. They immediately cross lines from business to politics and challenge our ideas about safety, freedom, and justice (…). 
–Joseph Menn

Black/White/Grey are terms used to describe hacker ethics whether they operate with criminal and illegal activity or towards to common good, or operate in a grey area combining the two. It is this fundamental question of ethical hacking within the almost non-regulated cyberspace that Pfeifer is interested in..

Parallel on view is Mario Pfeifer’s 2-channel-video-installation Again / Noch einmal (2018) that raises the question of civil courage and vigilantes justice. Pfeifer reconstructed an incident that took place in 2016 and in which, after a row with a supermarket cashier in the Saxon village of Arnsdorf, Schabas Al-Aziz, a refugee from Iraq, was physically harassed by four local residents and later tied to a tree. Whereas the four men were allowed to return home unobstructed by the police, Al-Aziz was taken to the police station and then released again after a certain length of time. Almost a year later, in April 2017, the court case relating to the incident was opened and dismissed after just a few hours. Al-Aziz, who suffered from epilepsy, had meantime died under unclear circumstances, found frozen to death in a forest. The court saw no public interest in clarifying the incident or prosecuting the men involved. With the support of research done by investigative journalists, Mario Pfeifer asks about the reasons for the dismissal of the case. “The case airs arguments that are both ambiguous and dead-ends,” says the artist: “How does a society treat refugees? How is empathy shown and to whom? How can a society close its eyes to those to whom it attributes less importance?”

In this video installation the incident was re-enacted by the two actors, Dennenesch Zoudé and Mark Waschke, and using evidence such as witness statements and video footage from the internet, reconstructs different views of the event. In this multi-perspectival way, different opinions and standpoints are compared and contrasted, unequivocal positions avoided. For the roles of a live audience in the re-staged scenes, he invited ten citizens with different migrant experiences to follow the reconstruction of the incident and, at the end, present their personal view of it.

The new installation has been realized in the context of a VISIT Artist in Residence programme grant from the innogy Foundation.

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Press contact
Anka Grosser, T +49 201 8845 160 / anka.grosser [​at​] museum-folkwang.essen.de