The video Eicosapentaens?ure by Martin Lorenz shows in a single take the scene on a fishing boat in the Mediterranean. The camera looks down on what is at first an empty vat, into which freshly caught loads of herring are successively dumped out of a net. Layer by layer, the catch is covered with ice and rinsed with water. In sobering pictures, the artist focuses in on the at once agonizing and relentless death throes of the perishing fish. On the acoustic level, the frenetic thrashing about of the fish mixes with loud motor sounds and the voices of the Sicilian fishermen. The aesthetic reduction to the shimmering blue of the fish in the soft Mediterranean light in particular lends the work a radical consistency with which the process of fishing is presented as a brutal yet fascinating drama. In the end, the full vat is covered with a wooden panel before the camera also closes its eye on the fish. Eicosapentaens?ure [eicosapentaenoic acid] is a high-grade omega-3 fatty acid that is found in abundance in fish oil. The title thus reflects critically on how people primarily view and handle the animals: as nothing more than food. [TR]