Berlin Biennale: The Army of Love, A Utopian Solution to Social Injustice

Berlin born artist, novelist and writer, Ingo Niermann teamed up with filmmaker, Alexa Karolinski to create a video installation entitled The Army of Love, for this year’s 9th Berlin Biennale. Tucked away in an underground space in the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, the film’s aims are clear — there is no room for confusion as to what the piece actually means and one feels significantly enlightened and hopeful about the future after watching it.

Niermann and Karolinski have produced a piece that proposes a utopian solution to the problem of loneliness, depicting a ‘supergroup’ of people who offer an all-encompassing love towards one another. Conceived in his novel, Solution 257: Complete Love (2011, Sternberg Press) Niermann plays out the idea in the setting of a Berlin spa, exploring relationships that exist in this unconventional group setting. Recordings of interviews are played as voiceovers, allowing for greater movement and fluidity in the visuals, whilst simultaneously reflecting the liberated voices that are no longer yoked to the body.

Niermann raises notions of love and beauty, drawing our attention to the perspective of those who are deemed ‘undesirable’ by society — the elderly, ugly and disabled. The Army of Love combats an issue that is so often ignored. A particularly powerful moment is the interview of a disabled woman, accompanied by images of her being carried in the water as she explains how she seeks ‘tenderness and sincerity’ in a relationship. Here, Niermann focuses our attention on the struggle disabled people face to find love, and how the mind, trapped in the body, has to deal with a sense of rejection from a society which places youth and beauty as paramount to finding love.

Niermann’s installation exposes the shortcomings of dating apps and causes us to reflect on how the liberalism of love in the modern age. Although dating is now seemingly more accessible, an app like Tinder revolves primarily around physical appearances, and has even led to the commodification of love, as one can spend a whole evening mindlessly swiping away potential matches. The Army of Love aims to break down social expectations, depicting a world where people are placed on an equal footing, and are ultimately all connected. In a scene where the participants perform Tai Chi style movements, the leader of the group walks around them, calm and proud of this sense of togetherness. Her voiceover explains her conscious effort to relax all the muscles in her face and release any tension, and comments on how stress can destroy the immune system.

In yet another memorable moment, an interviewee’s depiction of anxieties as multiple thorns embedded in the body, painful to the touch, is a helpful metaphor to explain how we must always be aware of individual sensitivities and offer a ‘completist love’ in which sympathy for those who do not fit into a superficial society, is transformed into indiscriminate love in order to achieve social justice. Austrian writer, Stephan Zweig taps into this idea in his novel, Beware of Pity. The narrator undergoes a moment of clarity when he realises his duty to love a disabled woman: ‘Love can truly help only those not favoured by fate, the distressed and disadvantaged, those who are less confident and not beautiful, the meek-minded. When love is given to them it makes up for what life has taken away.’