From 11 July, the central exhibition of the 4th Saxon State Exhibition "Boom. 500 years of industrial culture in Saxony" will present a contemporary artistic examination of the famous Annaberg mountain altar ( Erzgebirge). The 1521 painting of the altar by Hans Hesse shows in a realistic style scenes of the everyday mining routine in the Erzgebirge. The pictorial and intellectual world of this medieval work of art is the starting point for a large video installation at the beginning of the central exhibition, which was created by graduates and master students of the expanded cinema class: Paula Ábalos, Emerson Culurgioni, Charlotte Eifler, Deborah Jeromin, Mikhail Tolmachev together with Clemens von Wedemeyer. "Our reaction to the image is a new work and is entitled: 'Exploitation, or how to break the surface'. It is an artistic research, which starts close to the material part of the picture and tries to understand connections of the picture in today's world through the protagonist - a restorer. A media history also becomes visible: from painting to photography and the moving image to dematerialization or transformation in digital media. In this way we want to make visible workers' motions in the picture and follow indications of global connections of the exploitation of raw materials and its costs. With this approach we try to question the past identity of mining in Saxony for its validity“. 

The production of the video is made possible by the Ostdeutsche Sparkassenstiftung, the Erzgebirgssparkasse, the Kulturstiftung des Freistaates Sachsen as well as by the cooperation with the city of Annaberg-Buchholz and the Evangelical Lutheran parish of Annaberg-Buchholz. After its presentation at the state exhibition, the video installation will be permanently on display at a site of the UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Site of the Erzgebirge Coal and Steel Region/Krušnohoří in Annaberg-Buchholz. 

The state exhibition brings the region of Southwest Saxony to life in the "Year of Industrial Culture" as an important centre of European industrialisation. The large central exhibition in the Audi-Bau Zwickau, which is being organised by the German Hygiene Museum, presents a broad cultural-historical panorama of Saxony's industrial development. Parallel to this, industry-specific venue exhibitions will be held at six locations of Saxon industrial history.