The installation by Doris Weinberger has the appearance of an empty gallery room with heat and water pipes along the walls. If it were not for the sound recording issuing from loudspeakers mounted on plastic tubes, we would think that this is the natural infrastructure of the house installed externally, as is commonly seen in some industrial buildings.

Three different types of sounds echo from the loudspeakers: first there are recordings of joy and disappointment, so typical for a game of Ludo, then a manual for making an explosive is read aloud, written by the anarchist Johann Most at the end of the 19th century, who defended the use of violence for political aims, and finally, one can hear heroic scenes from historical films about religious crusades of the Middle Ages.

The title of the installation, Civil Game, is a paraphrase for the term “civil war”. It reflects the situation in which citizens of Western Europe, namely Germany, unexpectedly find themselves in the middle of the war against terror. This war has literally broken into their homes where aggressive human instincts used to be released harmlessly in table games such as Ludo, now these instincts have been transformed into an hysterical islamophobia. In her installation, the artist reminds us of a neglected fact: that the vices ascribed to Islam have long been present in our Western culture as well.
Marcel Fišer