Extended! Our current exhibition will be on view through March 30th.

We welcome your visit to the gallery during this time.

Tuesday - Friday: 11:00-17:00

Saturday: 12:00-16:00

All other times by appointment.

At the center of David Lieske’s exhibition is the photographic reproduction of German machine gun type 08/15. First developed in 1908 and improved in 1915, the automatic gun was the weapon of choice of the German Army during the First World War. A derivate of American inventor’s Hiram Maxim’s “classic” machine gun, which was at the time of its invention advertised as “The World’s Standard,” the name 08/15 entered German colloquial use as “Nullachtfünfzehn,” a description of something so standard that it is dull. 

The MG 08/15 is indeed also the origin of another notoriously German institution: The DIN-standard, which first applied in 1918 to a machine part of the gun, subsequently issued industrial norms for all kinds of objects ranging from paper sizes to table heights, thereby illustrating the somewhat clichéd notion of a German post-war civil society that, albeit no longer beset by the death drive of its past militarist ambitions, is yet filled to the brim with military values and their norms. In “Armed Interpretation,” Lieske traces the symbolic transformation of a killing machine to the societal automation of boredom. 

The artist’s interest in the machine gun was sparked by an image file he found in the collection of the Imperial War Museum in London. This particular gun had been captured by British troops in 1918 and donated to the museum, from where Lieske takes it to Oslo in an act of what he calls an “export of German mediocrity.”

Pictured:

David Lieske
Anti-Anti-, 2022
Magazine page, framed
Vanity Fair, July 2013 Issue
“Galliano in the Wilderness” by Ingrid Sischy
Photography by Annie Leibovitz
42.5 × 35.5 × 3 cm (16 ¾ × 14 × 1 ⅛ inches)

Lieske’s reproduction of the gun, for which he employed an image-generating AI to add interpretative depth, is divided into six panels, each of which is sized in a different DIN-standard for paper. They are attached to a free-standing wall that is propped up and weighted with sand bags reminiscent of a trench. Part sculpture, part exhibition architecture, the wall is sized 336 x 237,6 cm, a fictitious format DIN—3 (“DIN negative three”), which Lieske designed specifically for the exhibition. 

- Nina Franz