Hans und Grete
2002

In her two-channel video installation, Hans und Grete, Sue de Beer creates a layered narrative that focuses on two teenage couples—one preppie, one goth—who appear in classroom scenes that indirectly reference the cult horror films, Halloween (1978) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). As its pop culture-obsessed characters begin to grasp the events of the bloody 1999 massacre at Columbine High School, de Beer incorporates the near-mythological figures of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, a group of violent revolutionaries who terrorized Germany in the early 1970s, and whose young leaders were known as “Hans” and “Grete.” The teens in the work occupy themselves with sex and games and aspire to be rock stars, yet they can only cope with their experience of death through extreme fantasies of revenge. The work’s installation extends de Beer’s exploration of horror films as a deeply naïve yet ominous aspect of escapist youth culture. The video is projected on abutting screens, situated in an environment comprising enormous stuffed animal chairs arranged on plush, adolescent bedroom-like carpet.