“Media Democracy - Rendezvous of Truth” is a media-critical painting by the Berlin artist Sebastian Bieniek, created in 1995 (before his studies and at the age of 20).
Sebastian Bieniek about his own artwork:
The work explores in particular the filters and narratives that the media install between voters and those in power, such that practically no real connection exists between them anymore, and everything takes place only on the level of media projection,
which is constantly increased to the advantage of the media and those in power and to the disadvantage of the voter due to the resulting dissonance (which can supposedly only be resolved by even more media or media activity).
The voter is trapped and lost in a labyrinth of media narratives created by the media, so that virtually everything (every story) the voter could oppose to those in power is transformed into its opposite and thus never fulfills its function as criticism. It remains trapped by the media filter that acts like a shield around those in power.
Sebastian Bieniek, 3rd of august 2009
The work is painted in oil on canvas and measures 120 x 150 cm. It is signed in the lower left corner on the front and signed and titled a second time on the back.
"Media Democracy - Rendezvous of Truth", painting by Sebastian Bieniek
With his work “Media Democracy – Rendezvous of Truth”, Sebastian Bieniek creates a complex and provocative panorama that inevitably draws the viewer into the maelstrom of our contemporary media landscape.
The painting, which in its conceptual density is reminiscent of a kaleidoscopic collage, calls for a renewed reflection on how truth and power merge in the digital age, influencing, supporting, and nourishing each other.
In typical Bieniek fashion, the image is not a static representation, but a multifaceted exploration of the mechanisms of information dissemination. The central composition depicts a kind of rendezvous—a meeting—between different media forms and actors: social networks, news agencies, political icons, and faceless avatars. These figures appear to exist in a symbiotic, yet also parasitic, relationship to one another, and above all, in an inseparable dependency, like a body to its organs.
At the center of the painting is an oversized and dominant eye, reminiscent in its pictorial use of the Eye of Horus. This is embedded in a kind of screen supported by the lower body of an old man.
Branches sprout from this screen, and twigs grow from the branches, as if it were a tree. The unnaturally rounded shape of the branches makes them resemble a snake, around which people are depicted. People who look away, people who disappear, are distracted, or who are merely placeholders in a frame. The scene evokes the story of Paradise, the "Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil," and the serpent winding its branches. A naked woman lying on the ground bleeds, her blood nourishing a branch of the tree, while another takes the form of a phallus and approaches her from behind. Here, too, one might recognize motifs from one of the countless stories in which Jupiter, sometimes as a snake, sometimes as a bull (of Europa), approaches and impregnates her. In this painting, however, the impregnator is not a god, but the media machine, which spins on and on, always only around itself.
The color palette is deliberately reduced to strong and vibrant primary colors such as red, blue, yellow, green, and magenta, reflecting the exaggerated nature of the medium but also creating a certain artificiality and thus distance from the depicted figures. They are not people. They are puppets.
The use of separate colors in 20th-century printing techniques reinforces the impression of a filter that lies on the actual level of reality, thus preventing a view of it.
What makes this work particularly distinctive is the subtle irony with which Bieniek questions the illusion of transparency and authenticity in media-driven democracy. The "Rendezvous" appears as a meeting of masks—an allusion to the facade often maintained in the digital world. The painting invites the viewer to penetrate the surface and question the mechanisms that shape our perception.
Sebastian Bieniek succeeds here in a frightening way in bringing together the complexity of our information society in a single, powerful composition. “Media Democracy – Rendezvous of Truth” is not only an artistic call to vigilance, but also a mirror of our times, which, in its visual density, reveals an almost frightening truth: In media democracy, truth is no longer solid ground, but a fleeting place to be explored, and one that presupposes the explorer's own responsibility.
Text by Eugeniusz Stankiewicz, 2016
At the center is an oversized eye
Detail (the tree growing from a monitor) with a Eye of Horus in it)
"Media Democracy - Rendezvous of Truth", painting by Sebastian Bieniek
The all-seeing eye is at the center of the painting.
The Eye of Horus (Udjat Eye), which stands at the center of the painting "Media Democracy - Rendezvous of Truth," holds a special, sometimes archaic and even prehistoric, significance in many cultures. Overall, it can be said to represent "omniscient knowledge," which can, of course, also be interpreted as a form of surveillance. Indeed, the depiction of the "all-seeing eye" in many cultures, just as in J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" (where it is portrayed as Sauron's Eye), represents a power-hungry (in the form of the Ring), not to say power-addicted, machine.
The function of the eye, namely seeing and monitoring through seeing, is explored philosophically and sociologically in Michel Foucault's book "Discipline and Punish," which the artist Sebastian Bieniek, incidentally, thoroughly examined in 2000 when he collaborated with the prisons in Rennes, France, and Celle, Germany, on the installation
"Life is Bad" ("Die Welt ist schlecht" & "Le Monde est cruel"). Therefore, one can say that "critique of state surveillance" is indeed a common thread in Bieniek's work.
The essentially immanent and ubiquitous forms of surveillance of everything that have arisen through the Internet and a (one has to say it) enforced “online life” have given the eye in Bieniek’s painting a new, not to say prophetic, relevance, meaning and importance.
Never before in the entire history of mankind has so much been seen, recorded on data carriers, noted, repeatedly evaluated and monitored as today.
From the perspective, or according to the narrative, of today's tech giants, who have made the analysis of recorded data their business model, the surveillance of everything is supposed to be good and lead to a kind of surveillance paradise. This is a paradox when one considers Foucault's book, which sees and describes surveillance not as part of a paradise but as a prison practice. But it is precisely this paradox that propels us forward in the painting and its narrative.
We see an eye, the size of a head in relation to the body that bears it, perched atop the lower body of an old man clad only in briefs. It is framed within a screen the size of a television. From this screen extend branches and twigs, transforming the lower body into a trunk. Their round, elastic appearance is reminiscent of a snake's body, thus bringing us to the image of a snake and a tree, and consequently to the biblical story of Paradise.