Video installation for 1 projector
1.12 min. (loop)
PAL – color - silent
Specifications: The projected image should touch the floor.

Realisation & production: Koen Theys

private collection, Brussels (B)
private collection, Antwerp (B

In 1927 (years before he came to power in Germany), Adolf Hitler posed in a studio for his private photographer Heinrich Hoffmann. The pictures they made were used to study the dramatic effects of certain gestures, and how to use them during Hitler’s public apparitions. Hitler was one of the first (if not the first) politician(s) who introduced the idea of media-training. With morph-effects, Koen Theys brought these images of Heinrich Hoffmann to life in a ballet of Hitlerspeeches that never took place.

“… By effects of morphing and superposition of images, Koen Theys re-uses these stereotypes and gives us to see a burlesque choreography, in which Hitler, anti-hero alienated and lamentable, suffers from schizophrenia and duplicates itself ad infinitum…”
Ghislaine Pinassaud - Galerie XIPPAS

Entire article (FR)

“… Palms of the hands turned towards the sky, drawn aside fingers, opened wide eyes, hardness of the glances, mouth open, hallucinated face, as possessed: this melodramatic fright, fraught with consequences located at the borders of the mime, the cinema and the stopped images reveals aspects that are really threatening…”
Eric Vidal – ParisART

Entire article (FR)

“It is with the spectacle of an attractive but sick choreography, tragic and grotesque, pathetic and grating, that we are invited by the Belgian artist Koen Theys…”
François Jonquet - Nova magazine

Entire article (FR)

“… Even if those eight identical characters stand in the same picture framework, each of them lives in its own cosmos, has the eyes on infinity…”
Dries Vande Velde - KUNST NU

Entire article (NL)