ERSAN MONDTAG: ASBEST
KÖNIG GALERIE is pleased to present ASBEST, the first exhibition by Biennale artist, Ersan Mondtag, with the gallery.
May 1 – June 22, 2025
The exhibition, ASBEST, delves deeper into both the personal and collective narratives of this overlooked generation who worked for both their own as well as Germany’s prosperity. The show, featuring many new works, focuses on the life of Hasan Aygün and his gradual process of assimilation, where the foreign land inevitably became a second home.
Among the new pieces is a series of 28 busts entitled, “The Unknown Man”, showing the gradual changes in Aygün’s face over the years. The first sculpture, embodying the year 1962, previously shown in the German Pavilion at the “Werkstatt”, as well the final sculpture, number 28, showing the last year of Aygün’s working life, are both presented in St. Agnes. In addition, a third bust, number 14, marking the midpoint of Aygün’s working life, conveys a moment when the transformations wrought by the laboring body have already become evident. With this form of sculptural representation, which was historically reserved for those “deserving” subjects of the upper classes, Mondtag presents his viewpoint as a kind of historical correction, reflected in both the title and design of the original show in Venice.
The exhibition weaves a composition of fateful events through a host of new works. It contrasts the poetics of Aygün’s family life with the harsh bureaucratic and medical realities that shaped it. Mondtag transforms X-ray images of his grandfather’s lungs into sculptural evidence of the invisible threats that he faced in his lifetime, in a work where X-ray images are superimposed onto granite-like slabs made by ETERPLAN, the company where Aygün spent his entire working life.
Video works documenting the performative ritual of life in “Monument of an Unknown Man” from Venice, also form a crucial part of ASBEST, along with the staging of German bureaucratic communication and other such documents. In this way, the exhibition sets a striking and nuanced contrast to contemporary discourses on the migration of people from one culture to another.