Atomkrieg

Texts by Joachim Bessing, Alexa Hennig von Lange, Christian Kracht, Ulrike and Antje Kuschel, Antje Majewski, Christiane Mennicke, Dora Miran, Ingo Niermann

Like space travel, nuclear war has for decades created a vast new territory for the imagination. People have envisaged two enemy blocs fighting a final war in which a blazing fire consumes the world. In science fiction novels and films, great writers and film-makers have thought up possible worlds during or after a nuclear war. Artists, however, have tended to subordinate themselves to the idea of the impossibility of adequate representation.

The publication documents new works by Bruno, Pawel and Szymon Althamer, Christoph de Babalon, Markus Dinig, Lukas Duwenhögger, Olafur Eliasson, Isa Genzken, Julian Göthe, Sebastian Hammwöhner /Dani Jakob, Chris Korda, Ulrike Kuschel, Sarah Lucas, Martine Maffetti, Antje Majewski, Aleksandra Mir, Mathilde Rosier, Eva Rothschild, Neal Tait, Salla Tykkä, and Gary Webb.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Atomkrieg at Kunsthaus Dresden (May 20 – July 11, 2004), all stories and essays are written specially for the exhibition. Most of the writers are part of a contemporary German pop-literature and translated for the first time into English.