Oliver Zahn: CROWD CONTROL

In these exercises, not only do uniformed officers in balaclavas, helmets and body armor take part, but also fellow officers – under the direction of training instructors – perform the roles of protesters. They chant political slogans, insult their colleagues, attack them with mock projectiles, and wear the insignia of political subcultures – only to become targets of police interventions themselves. This is a form of genuine police theater, designed to make tangible the state’s logic of rendering spaces and people legible and governable in the name of public security.

In CROWD CONTROL, seven performers transpose these police tactics and practices – normally classified as “confidential” – into the black box of the theater: a deliberately ambiguous simulation setting where the boundaries between the logic of theater and the logic of policing begin to blur.