Berlin Slaughterhouse, 1986 – 88

On 16th December, 2011, three days after his forty-ninth birthday, Knoefel unexpectedly died of a heart attack. Just the week before we had agreed to show Schlachthaus (Slaughterhouse) in my gallery as part of the major exhibition on photography in the GDR that the Berlinische Galerie was planning for the autumn of 2012. What we can show now is an attempt to reconstruct his Schlachthaus work, with copious material that has never been exhibited before. The over 1000 photos that Knoefel shot in the East Berlin meat-packing plant between 1986 and 1988 clearly show the insecurity that results from the primal experience of killing that Knoefel exposed himself to. Although the photos are a unique historical document of the GDR, the location nonetheless has a certain topicality, which the exhibition represents by analogy in the labyrinth of steel plates. In attempting to equalise the positions of perpetrator and victim visually, Knoefel’s abstractive photographs transcend the documentary to attain philosophical dimension. Friedrich Loock, 2012