Christoph Schlingensief’s Big Brother Container or How Can Art Get Political?

In this presentation, I will show excerpts from a documentary movie made about this project. For Claire Bishop it represents one of the most important examples of delegated performances, an important feature of the art scene in the last decade. Schlingensief died two years ago from cancer and posthumously won the Golden Lion in 2011, the highest prize in the Venice Biennale, with his pavilion. I had a long artistic partnership with him and appointed him for his directorial debut back in 1993.

Matthias Lilienthal studied theatre, history and German studies. He started his career in theatre in 1979, and has since worked as artistic director in Theatre Basel and the Volksbühne (Berlin), collaborating with directors and artists such as Frank-Patrick Steckel, Achim Freyer, Christoph Marthaler, Johann Kresnik, Michael Simon, Stefan Bachmann, Stefan Pucher, Andrej Woron and Armin Petras, as well as his good friend Christoph Schlingensief. In mid-2000, Lilienthal was appointed deputy director of performing arts at the Berlin Akademie der Künste, and was program director for Theater der Welt 2002 festival in Bonn, Düsseldorf, Cologne and Duisburg later that year. In May/June 2000, he collaborated with Christoph Schlingensief on the Ausländer Aus (Foreigners Out!) project for the Wiener Festwochen and the follow-up book, published by Suhrkamp. He was manager and artistic director of the new Hebbel Theatre GmbH, Berlin, with the theatre locations HAU 1, HAU 2 and HAU 3, since September 2003. Among the artists who regularly work at the HAU are the collective Rimini Protokoll, Constanza Macras, Chris Kondek, Hans-Werner Kroesinger, Mette Ingvartsen and Jeremy Wade. Under Lilienthal’s directorship, HAU was named Theatre of the Year by the magazine Theater Heute in 2004, and in 2007 won the German Design Award for its campaign with Neukölln boxers. Lilienthal has also collaborated over many years with Krzysztof Warlikowski’s Novy Teatr in Warsaw, Johan Simon’s NT Gent and Bruno Beltrãos Grupo de Rua de Niterói in Rio de Janeiro, and Alain Platel and his Compagnie C.de la B.



Christoph Schlingensief was a pivotal figure of German culture in the noughties. Starting out as a trash and horror filmmaker, he was very influenced by the new television formats presented by reality TV. He provoked controversy and a media frenzy in the Republic of Austria in 2000, when the halfway-fascist Freedom Party had recently taken power, with the project "Foreigners out! Schlingensief's Container". For the project, he built a container directly beside the state opera house. In this container lived ten asylum seekers, and the population of Austria could vote every day on which asylum seeker should leave the county first.