Mario Pfeifer is a visual artist and film-maker whose practice develops from specific social, political, and cultural situations. His film and video installations, photography, and text-based works have been developed in locations including Mumbai, California, Western Sahara, and Germany, where local conditions serve as starting points for examining broader structures of power, racism, and violence. Across his practice, Pfeifer resists conventional documentary formats by constructing situations that begin where legal, moral, or institutional frameworks fail, questioning how evidence, responsibility, and narrative authority are produced and legitimized. To do so, he works with found footage, testimony, re-enactment, and archival or forensic material, allowing contradictions and unresolved questions to remain visible. In Again/ Noch einmal (2018), he staged a civilian tribunal to revisit a racist assault in eastern Germany, exposing how judgment is socially produced beyond the courtroom. In Proof of the Unthinkable (2022) and Cell 5—800° Celsius: Act I—Testimony of a Lighter (2021), he collaborated with activists and forensic experts to materially reconstruct evidence related to the death of asylum seeker Oury Jalloh in a German police station, confronting unresolved institutional violence and the absence of accountability. For the exhibition, Pfeifer contributes a new video work addressing current military recruitment and the persistent asymmetries of war. Drawing on found footage from ongoing recruitment processes across regions and interviews with recruited people from Cameroon drawn to fight in the Russian army, the work examines enlistment processes and contractual conditions through which people are mobilized to fight in conflicts not of their own making. By linking present-day testimonies to the historical experiences of the Tirailleurs, Pfeifer questions war as a continuing structure, exposing how coercion, racialization, and expendability persist across Generations.

Commissioned by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), co-produced by Mario Pfeifer and HKW, 2026

Work in the exhibition: wutame | caché (2026), HD Video, colour & b/w, stereo 2.0, c.10–15', French and Russian with En/Ger subs. With SAVVY Kwata (research), Nana Mbatchou Ricardo (line production), Patrick Same Edjidji (drone operator), Feelingz Records (camera rental), blackboardfilms (post-production). Courtesy of the artist and KOW, supported by SAVVY Kwata and Goethe-Institut Cameroon