Erik Niedling
Erik Niedling (born 1973 in Erfurt, Thuringia) is a German artist. He is also known for his 2010 film "The Future of Art", a documentary on the contemporary art scene. Life and works. Niedling was raised in Erfurt and lives in Berlin. His works revolve around the construction of history, the traces that history left in the collective mind. Later works are also marked with questions on collecting, archiving and organising, whereby the preservation and (fictitious) disappearance of one's own identity comes to the fore. Since the mid-2000s, Niedling has established himself as a conceptual artist and  since 2006 collaborates with German writer Ingo Niermann. The confrontation with a pyramid mountain as an individual burial ground represents a structuring model of his artistic work. Along with Ingo Niermann he directed and produced the documentary "The Future of Art". It consist of interviews with contemporary artists, critics, and collectors such as Olafur Eliasson, Harald Falckenberg, Damien Hirst, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Marina Abramović, Olaf Breuning, Terence Koh, Genesis P-Orridge, Boris Groys, and Tobias Rehberger. In the course of the film, Niermann develops the idea of a pyramid mountain as a work of art, which is also the individual  burial place of a collector. At the end of the shooting, Niermann transferred the idea to Erik Niedling, who has since continued it in sometimes radical art projects. In particular, "Mein letztes Jahr" (My last year), in which Niedling, implementing a drill by Ingo Niermann, consistently lived for one year in the period from 1 March 2011 to 29 February 2012, as if it were his last. This was followed by exhibitions and publications dealing with his artistic and biographical estate as well as the further realisation of the pyramid mountain. On 8 May 2017, Niedling performed a ritual possession  (Seizure) of the mountain Kleiner Gleichberg in the district of Hildburghausen (Thuringia) for the first time, where since then the "Burial of the White Man" festival has been held on the mountain every 8 May. A critical reflection of his activities took place through publications ("The Future of Art: A Diary", 2012), interviews and most recently with the novel "Burial of the White Man" (Sternberg Press 2019).