Rudolf Herz: Lenin on Tour - Tapa dura

In 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the city council in Dresden decided to remove its statue of Lenin, a symbol of the no longer existent Communist regime. The monument was taken down and given to a Swabian stonemason. In the summer of 2004, Rudolf Herz borrowed this enormous torso of Lenin and placed it, along with two other anonymous statues, on the back of a truck and drove them all over Europe. Each evening the truck would stop in a different city where artists, sociologists, cultural scientists, economists and common people on the streets were asked to give their views on Lenin in the twenty-first century: l show Lenin to my contemporaries. And the 21st century to Lenin. Who will explain it to him? This remarkable tour was recorded by a film team and by photographers Reinhard Matz and Irena Wunsch. The resulting images, along with statements from a variety of witnesses form the basis of the Lenin on Tour project, which has taken shape as a documentary film, an exhibition, and now in the form of this book. Rudolf Herz, born in 1954 in Sonthofen, is a conceptual artist concerned with questions of public memory and oblivion. Herz has exhibited widely and received numerous awards. He lives in Munich and Paris.