DIS>Play: Stefan Panhans – SORRY, 2010

In Stefan Panhans’ film, we see a curiously overcrowded railway car. The situation is familiar, at least for rail passengers. There are no free seats; people push their way through the aisles, the police are keeping an eye on football fans. However, the people in Panhans’ video nevertheless make a strange and artificial impression. Like in a collage, people and characters from contemporary media are assembled in them to form a curious group portrait. The viewers thinks that he can recognise Jonathan Meese and Karl Lagerfeld, other VIP lookalikes are in the train: Lady Gaga, Johnny Depp, Lara Croft, Amy Winehouse and ‘Brangelina’. Silent and absent, the people execute more or less ritualised actions whose meaning we cannot reality identify. SORRY is a disconcerting surreal image of the times whose artificial exaggeration is nevertheless very closely related to media-based reality.