Scharfe Feder, feine Nadel
('Sharp quill, fine needle')
In Chodowiecki's world
The experimental physicist, satirist and master of aphorisms Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742 – 1799) was one of the defining voices of German Enlightenment. His Göttingen pocket calendars, scrap books and short pieces of prose reveal an acute perception; his seemingly casual observations are peppered with unflinching self-scrutiny and scepticism with regard to any certainty. Lichtenberg also commented on his contemporary Daniel Chodowiecki's etchings, which shine a light on the bourgeois era and its sensitivities, role play and controlling social conventions. Looking at this imagery as a whole, Lichtenberg developed the art of precise observation: physiognomy as an expression of human freedom, deception and self-staging.
With laconic humour and exquisite irony, Lichtenberg riffled through the grand novel of everyday life – in whose scenes anyone and everyone 'performs'. Together with Chodowiecki's folios, this created a space for enlightenment that reveals rationality and emotion, observation and participation, body and character. Boris Aljinović explores Chodowiecki's imagery with Lichtenberg's literary finesse, satire and the curiosity of a natural scientist.
The stage and screen actor Boris Aljinovic played one of the inspectors in the Berlin-set episodes of the long-running television crime series Tatort, a role he inhabited from 2002 to 2014. He has performed, for example, in productions at the Renaissance Theater in Berlin, the Ernst Deutsch Theater Hamburg and the Hamburger Kammerspiele. He has also contributed to a number of audio book recordings. A wide audience also knows Boris Aljinovic as a director.
