Mischa Kuball | metaphases

metaphases_mephisto version

2025

Photo: Claus Bach, Weimar

In Metaphases, a 1-channel video projection from 2004, Mischa Kuball projected, distorted and deconstructed 81 portraits from a 1965 illustrated book Porträts aus dem geistigen Deutschland by the photographer Paul Swiridoff in the form of complex light projections. This intellectual ancestral gallery of post-war Germany traverses the space and, as it were, the cycle of life in an eternal appearance and disappearance. In Weimar, Kuball takes this as the starting point for the binary question of our idea of Mephisto and Faust - which is why the existing portraits have been supplemented by representational ‘avatars’ of a figure of Faust and Mephisto.

metaphases_mephisto version

Works