Abstract

The Church of Fear, a project initiated by Schlingensief in 2003 as the second war on Iraq erupted, was a multi-media artwork that encompassed installation, performance and public as well as cyber-activism. Schlingensief’s mobile event traversed various public spaces from the 2003 Venice Biennale to the financial centre of Frankfurt in order to encourage the participation of spectators or passers-by in a period marked by paranoid political discourses that evoked both fear and fundamentalism. I argue that Schlingensief’s Church of Fear sought to establish itself as a counter-discourse to the commodification of fear through politics, religion and the ‘war on terror’ and intentionally obfuscated the borders between art, politics, social critique and reality.