Interview with Ersan Mondtag  “Life is terribly plotted”

Ersan Mondtag is an interdisciplinary artist working across visual art, theatre and opera. For Berlin Art Week 2026, he developed the performance “Alternde Meister” together with Nadim Samman at Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie. There, 25 performers from different generations engaged European paintings dating from the 13th to the 18th century. How does Mondtag view a society that is increasingly quick to categorise people, and what role can art play in challenging the way we see them?

Ersan Mondtag, when you consider the mood in German society today, where do you still see genuine attentiveness among people, and where do you feel it is lacking?

What bothers me is how much we want to know about each other, but how little we actually know each other. We’re constantly following who said what, what position someone takes, what mistakes they’ve made. But at the same time, the spaces where people actually live alongside each another – where they can argue, eat, work, get bored and have to put up with each other – are disappearing. I find attentiveness much more often in the small things: among friends, between neighbours, within an ensemble. Care is not something that translates particularly well for the media. It rarely has a punchline, and even more rarely a hashtag. 

You describe a society in which people know a lot about each other without really knowing each other. Against this background, what issues currently preoccupy you as an artist?

At the moment, I’m very preoccupied by what happens when a society loses its capacity for ambivalence. We want a clear label for everything: right, wrong; victim, perpetrator; friend, enemy; progressive, reactionary. Apparently, we find this reassuring. Personally, I find it boring. Unfortunately, human beings are more complicated than this. We can be totally convinced of our own moral virtue in the morning, but in the afternoon, out of jealousy, do something terrible. Theatre is one of the few places where people can still be two contradictory things at the same time, without having an explanatory text attached to them. 

You speak of ambivalence. At the same time, people in public debates are often described in terms of categories such as generation, background, social class or political affiliation. In your work, you encounter people with very different life stories. What is lost when we view people primarily through such categories? And what have these encounters taught you about how quickly we categorise people?

First of all, it saves an enormous amount of time. You don’t have to get to know the other person. You know their background, gender, age – just add their political views and you supposedly know who is standing in front of you. It’s very efficient. But then the actual person disappears. Clearly, we need categories. Without them, it would be impossible to describe social inequalities. But an analytical tool can quickly turn into an identity machine. Instead of describing the person, it eventually replaces them. I wouldn’t want to be reduced to five nouns either. That means I should extend the same right to others.

And yet we constantly get people completely wrong. We see someone and instantly start building a picture of them: their clothes, the way they speak, their age, background and profession. We think we have them figured out. Then they tell us one thing about their life, and suddenly the whole picture falls apart. I love that. I’ve met people whose lives are so improbable that, as theatre characters, I would probably have cut them from the script. The director would have argued that no one would have believed us. But as it turns out, life is terribly plotted anyway. Thank goodness. 

If categories and first impressions are not enough, at what point do you feel genuinely close to another person? What does it take for perception to become genuine understanding?

I’m not even sure I want to be completely understood. To me, that almost feels threatening. Closeness arises more when someone doesn’t immediately try to fix my contradictions. Being able to be sad without instantly receiving a diagnosis. Being able to sit in silence without making anyone nervous. In a completely shitty situation, suddenly being able to laugh together. I think it’s much more intimate when two people can accept that a part of the other will always remain out of reach. Even in love, you should be allowed to remain a mystery to one another.

Can art change the way we see other people? And if so, how does that happen?

Art tends to overestimate its own power. Seeing an exhibition doesn’t automatically make someone a better person. If it did, German history might have turned out rather differently, given the sheer number of museums in the country. Nor do I believe that it’s art’s job to make people better. What it can do though, is shake our certainties. I find that much more interesting. You enter with a fixed idea about something and leave with a small crack in it. Art doesn’t need to do much more than that. That’s already quite a lot.

In “Alternde Meister”, which you developed with Nadim Samman for Berlin Art Week 2026 at the Gemäldegalerie, 25 performers from different generations entered into a dialogue with the Old Masters. The transience of human bodies and life stories was set against works of art preserved in the museum for centuries. Was this way of looking at people also the starting point for the performance?

What interested me was why we’re actually so afraid of a life becoming visible. We retouch faces, optimise bodies, fight fatigue and treat ageing as if it were some kind of accident. At the same time, we visit museums and admire 500-year-old objects precisely because they’re old. On a painting, we call it patina; in a person, decay. For me, Alternde Meister was therefore less about age than about our way of seeing things, about how bad we’ve actually become at looking.

In your view, which aspects of older people does society overlook?

Desire. We grant old people care, perhaps wisdom, sometimes even that awful cuteness. But sexuality, vanity, maliciousness, infatuation, delusions of grandeur? I find it absurd to imagine that at seventy you suddenly become a morally purified version of yourself. You’re probably still the same idiot, only with more experience. Old people aren’t some preliminary stage of death. They’re living people. And life is indecent, vain, lustful, envious, funny and occasionally pretty undignified. Thank God.

For “Alternde Meister”, you worked with people who weren’t playing roles, but brought themselves and their own experiences of ageing, transience and death into the performance. How did that change the artistic process?

They’re harder to lie to. An actor knows the convention. We jointly claim something and try to create a truth out of it. With these people, the truth was already there. When a couple who have lived together for decades sit side by side, I don’t need to tell them how to be intimate. Quite the opposite. By giving them the wrong instruction, I’d ruin that moment. For me, this was a useful exercise in losing power. Directors aren’t necessarily trained to do less. We like to believe that everything happens because of us. Sometimes good directing simply means stepping out of the way at the right moment.

In many of your works, you deal with vulnerability, mortality and memory. Why are these themes so important to you artistically?

Because art that pretends to have overcome death usually strikes me as being pretty dead itself. Vulnerability begins where our control ends. The body betrays us. Memory betrays us. People leave us. We leave people. Things that seemed completely certain suddenly come to an end. I don’t actually find that especially bleak. Nor am I interested in death as some romantic fog machine. Death itself is probably rather uninteresting. What’s more interesting is what the knowledge of it does to our lives. In any case, the more acutely I become aware of mortality, the greater my hunger for life becomes.

Given that mortality and disappearance play such a significant role in your work, is there anything you wish we, as a society, would notice earlier, before it disappears?

Freedom. Not the grand kind of freedom you find on some monument. I mean the small freedoms that have become so normal that we barely recognise them as such anymore. Walking through a city at night. Loving whoever you want to love. Making an absurd work of art. Contradicting a government. Being allowed to make the wrong choice. Being allowed to be a stranger. Being allowed to be unreasonable. Being allowed, every now and then, to say something you’ll consider nonsense three years from now. Such things rarely disappear with a dramatic fanfare. There are small shifts. Each one, on its own, seems reasonable at first, justifiable, not especially bad. And then one day, we turn around and notice that something is missing. I’m not interested in disappearance out of nostalgia. What interests me is this terrible human reflex: often only fully grasping the value of something once it is no longer there.

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October 2026