The Great Dictator

Sep 11–Oct 11, 2019
zqm, Berlin

In The Great Dictator at zqm, Nadja Verena Marcin inhabits Charlie Chaplin’s legendary 1940 speech, transforming its cinematic call for peace and resistance into a contemporary act of political and artistic address. Chaplin’s Jewish barber, mistaken for the dictator Hynkel, breaks from satire to deliver a plea for humanity against tyranny. Marcin reactivates this moment, transposing its urgency onto today’s global landscape, where the resurgence of neo-nationalism collides with the performative power of art.

The ambiguity that charges Chaplin’s words—dictator or revolutionary, parody or prophecy—remains unresolved. Marcin intensifies this doubleness by channeling the gestures of authoritarian masculinity through her female body. In doing so, she unsettles the codes of power, bending gendered embodiment into a reflection on who gets to speak, who is heard, and how authority is performed.

Chaplin once aligned progress with science, aviation, and radio, envisioning technology as a promise of liberation. Eight decades later, Marcin reframes this optimism within the paradoxes of digital modernity: surveillance masquerades as freedom, data undermines democracy, and communication networks that promise global connection instead replicate structures of control. By re-voicing Chaplin, she stages the dissonance between past utopias and present crises—consumerism, ecological collapse, digital authoritarianism.

At its core, The Great Dictator interrogates leadership. Where Chaplin appeals to soldiers to abandon servitude to dictatorship, Marcin turns to artists, asking: Whose soldiers are we? Are artists agents of public dialogue or captives of intellectual enclaves and market hierarchies? Is the art world a fragile counterforce, or is it complicit in systems of power it seeks to critique?

The uncanny parallel that David Robinson once drew between Chaplin and Hitler—mirror figures embodying opposite poles of humanity—echoes here in Marcin’s recursive performance: the artist-as-comedian-as-dictator. In this layering, she exposes the art world’s entanglement in its own contradictions: power and precarity, visibility and dependence, critique and complicity.

The Great Dictator thus operates as both reenactment and rupture, a mirror held to culture’s ongoing flirtation with authority. By re-staging Chaplin’s cry for humanity, Marcin pushes the question back onto her audience: Who are you, where are you, and what do you want to believe?

The solo exhibition was held in conjunction with Berlin Art Week 2019. The production of the work was sponsored by Wellesley College.