Markus Uhr

This catalogue has been published to co-incide with the premier of Sarah Morris's seventh film, 1972 at The Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus and Kunstbau München in 2008. Since the mid-1990s, Sarah Morris has been internationally recognised for her complex abstractions and films, which are derived from close observation of the architecture and psychology of urban environments. Her films operate in the realm of documentary, biography of a city, and non-narrative fiction and focus on the importance of architecture, the role of the state, critique of power, and the aesthetic tension between the commercial and the political. In 1972, Morris mixes police surveillance footage of demonstrators and archival photographs of the 1972 Summer Olympic Games, with shots of the impressive Munich Olympiapark and a candid interview with Georg Sieber who has a long-standing career as a psychologist and is an expert on international security matters. The film, shot on 35mm, investigates the issue of projection and planning and its potential failures through this specific instance in history. It exposes a subjective parallel view radically different than the widely received ideas around the events of the 1972 Munich Olympics.