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Walter Benjamin vs. Bertolt Brecht

For their contribution to Brecht and Benjamin: Thinking in Extremes at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, Broomberg & Chanarin built a chess automaton that reconstructs a photograph of a game played between Benjamin and Brecht in 1934. This is the last image of the two together. The game continues on this mechanical artificial intelligence machine, showing every possible variation of the game’s ending. Viewers are therefore offered a prediction of the past. In the light of what transpired we cannot avoid a lingering sense of melancholy for what did in fact happen, nor resist the urge to rewrite history.