Peter Friedl
Liberty City, 2007
Video, color, sound, 1:11 min., loop
Edition of 3 + 1 AP
Liberty City

In his video Liberty City (2007), Friedl addresses a standard historical scene. On the night of 17 December 1979, the (black) motorcyclist Arthur McDuffie was stopped by (white) cops on the corner of North Miami Avenue and 38th Street and beaten to death. When the accused policemen were acquitted five months later, riots broke out in Liberty City. It was the darkest moment in the history of Miami. Desolate Liberty City haunts voyeuristic reality TV series in emulation of Homicide. Friedl inverts the dramatic structure: In his nocturnal scene staged and filmed on site, the (white) cop is beaten up. The looped and uncut sequence appears like filmed by an eyewitness. In fact, it is a meticulously constructed, dramatic study. The film was shot in the streets of the Liberty Square Housing Project, a residential complex built during the Roosevelt era in the 1930s for African American residents. To keep the black and white communities separated, a wall was erected on the eastern boundary of Liberty Square, the remains of which can still be seen today. Friedl’s short loop is an homage to the community of Liberty City—epic theater in the genre of documentary aesthetics.

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Peter Friedl

Peter Friedl was born in Oberneukirchen, Austria, in 1960, and currently lives and works in Berlin. Since the early nineties, he has been building up a heterogeneous body of work (photography, painting, video, drawing, text) with a strong component of social and political critique. Friedl draws attention to the conflicts between contemporary politics and aesthetic narrative. He often turns to genres (tableaux vivant, documents) and subject matter (childhood, social exclusion) that are undervalued in the modern artistic tradition, and uses displacement and overexposure to challenge accepted systems of representation. Friedl pushes the boundaries of genres and codes for purposes that are clearly critical. He is best known for the photographic works he produced in South Africa, Haiti, Brazil and other places that were the scenes of Europe’s colonial past, and for his work based on American philosopher John Rawls’ theory of justice. He has published numerous essays and critical texts on theatre and aesthetics.

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