Industrial Transnationalism at the 44th Venice Biennale: Reinhard Mucha’s Das Deutschlandgerät (The Germany Device)

In 1990, Reinhard Mucha, together with the photographer duo Bernd and Hilla Becher, was West Germany’s representative at the 44th Venice Biennale. With his site-specific installation, Das Deutschlandgerät, Mucha drew attention to a striking parallel between the long manufacturing histories of his native Rhine-Ruhr region of western Germany and the Veneto region of northern Italy. This paper contends that Das Deutschlandgerät reveals the artist’s development of an industrial transnational approach to artmaking. Through the medium and strategy of sculptural assemblage, Mucha treated the West German Pavilion of the Federal Republic as a space of intercultural encounter in which two post-industrial societies could converge both conceptually and materially. In 2002, and again in 2021, the artist adapted this project for its permanent display in the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen’s grand neo-Renaissance building, K21 Ständehaus, effectively bringing two distinct but related regions in Germany and Italy into dialogue twice more.