Želimir Žilnik

The artwork Inventur – Metzstraße 11 (Inventory – Metzstraße 11) by Želimir Žilnik was part of the exhibition Tell me about ~~yesterday~~ tomorrow (Nov. 28, 2019 until Oct. 18, 2020).

About the artist

Since the 1960s, Želimir Žilnik (born in Niš in 1942) has been capturing crucial transitions in his home country (now Serbia) and beyond through short films, documentaries, feature films, and essay films. From the Socialist regime under Tito to West Germany in the 1970s and the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, his oeuvre, which now encompasses over 50 films, reflects on the cultural, political, and economic conditions of various societies. Critical and always radically independent, he reveals the mechanisms involved in exclusion and oppression. Issues of migration are a particular focus of his films.

Video, 9 min

In his short film Inventur – Metzstraße 11, Želimir Žilnik creates a striking portrait of an international, multicultural shared housing community in Munich in 1975. One by one, 30 residents of a rental building go on camera, on the building’s stairs, to tell about their lives. Many of them have come to what was then West Germany as “guest workers”. Their home countries include Italy, Greece, Turkey, and other places with which Germany had signed labor recruitment agreements starting in 1955. In an ironic allusion to the statistical stocktaking procedures implemented by the authorities, Žilnik’s camera documents the subjects’ names, nationalities, and living and working conditions. But it is the people themselves who take stock of their situations and determine the length, content, and language of their filmed appearances. In this way, we learn much more than a bureaucratic file could tell us, hearing about the residents’ fears and hopes and the feelings of foreignness that follow them through their daily lives as immigrants in Germany.

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