• View
• Edit
• History
• Print

Project Description

---

Now and ten years ago

This is the concept for an exhibition and an investigation into gentrification and cultural development of urban structures in Berlin and New York.

The intention of the project is to investigate the relation between art production and urban planning, as seen under the perspective of artistic debates.

A point of departure is the cultural conversion of neighbourhoods as it happened in the East Village in New York in the early 80s and Berlin-Mitte in the early 90s.

The exhibition tries to reflect upon the political aspects of urban development as much as their mythical and discursive dimensions which are subjected to change over the years.

Research about influences of culture in city planning and politics usually argue on in terms of social sciences.

In general art and culture are said to play an important role in the process of gentrification by creating bohemian neighbourhoods.

Art in this context, however, is seen as an almost statistical parameter, as a conglomeration of people, products and processes, without necessarily having a specific content, aesthetic or agenda.

In contrast our project assumes that the restructuring of urban space goes hand in hand with a specific articulation of artistic production and that this production is able to reflect upon its very function within these urban processes.

As a result gentrification seems to create a specific cultural practice, which not only attempts to resist but produces a productive interrelation to the urban development.

By means of investigation, exhibition and an accompanying publication the project tries to examine these interrelations in Berlin Mitte and in particular the “Spandau Suburb” around the August Strasse.

Already during the phase of investigation a set of brochures is being published, covering commentated bibliographies and the main topics like gentrification, art in public, the urban space and bohemia... etc

The exhibition documents and reconstructs aesthetic production at the beginning of the nineties and tries a re-valuation from the distance of ten years ("archaeology").

In addition the project attempts to relate these findings to other bohemian neighbourhoods, as it was ten years earlier the example of the boom&bust bohemia in New York’s East Village.

This point of reference is represented in the exhibition by the archive of Stephan Dillemuth and Josef Strau about art in New York’s East Village.

Individual contributions of international artists work on the relationship of urban policy and artistic production in Berlin under subjective and comparative criteria ("Comparative Studies").

Essays for the exhibition deal both theoretically and descriptively with the relationship of culture and urban development.

The preliminary studies are carried out by Stephan Dillemuth and Josef Strau (artists, formerly Friesenwall 120, Cologne) and also Axel J. Wieder (art historian, pro-square-meter) in collaboration with experts and the participating artists.

The exhibition will take place in KW e. V., Institute for Contemporary Art, a leading art-institution in Berlin. The publications will be internationally distributed.

1. Archaeology

A typical art form, which inhabited Berlin and its half-public spaces around 1993, were - often quite anonymous - sculptures made of iron and metal.

They stood as an attempt of appropriation of urban or private space in the apparently empty or neglected areas, they stood as symbol of an appropriation with the means of the art.

Nevertheless they found hardly any artistic acknowledgment or canonisation as individual sculptures.

Just as radically and suddenly as their appearance was their disappearance.

Sometimes they could be kept in the context of architecture as some regionalist relic.

The mediation into a wider or international context hardly ever took place.

The metal sculptures are an example of the aesthetics of an acute, dense phase of change and reorganisation.

Aesthetic objects like those, as remarkable connections to a certain time, are losing a part of their attractiveness for the observer after some years.

Sometimes they become almost embarrassing and unpleasant, "uncanny".

Translated into psychoanalytical terms the access to their latent aesthetic contents -to their temporary ability to consolidate general desires- is “blocked".

The aesthetic "archaeology" of the early nineties serves as constant structure and serves, in the exhibition, as background for the current contributions.

The time period in question is thereby less documented than aesthetically recalled and made accessible for an examination.

Particularly suitable seems to be spatial and sculptural work and architectural interventions in the exhibition space, which were investigated by the project team and arranged and/or reconstructed in co-operation with the artists.

2. Comparative Studies

The contributions from artists to the exhibition are organized under two different aspects.

On the one hand historical positions are shown, which, like found objects, have to be uncovered, re-ordered and interpreted.

These artists have produced exhibitions at the beginning of the nineties, which were concerned with the function of art within city-political processes, but their work was underestimated at that time or simply overlooked.

a) One example is the exhibition of Oktavian Trautmannsdorff (gallery Lukas & Hoffmann, Berlin 1994), which should be reconstructed in parts.

Trautmannsdorff assembled in this exhibition different documents of appropriation of space, like flyers of the squatter movement, a video documentation of an attempt to break into the studio of the artist in the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, a cartography of the planned buildings of the Berlin Olympics or a documentation of Trautmannsdorff s daily operations in the gallery space.

With this exhibition different issues of that time can be traced: the documentary and discursive art practice as much as the euphorically welcomed foundation of galleries, which collided rapidly with the propagandists of a political correctness.

In the retrospect this exhibition appears like a symbolic condensation of a situation typical for that time, which will be documented next to other work to be questioned for its re-constructed ness and tested upon its validity.

b) On the other hand we will have contributions which are based on individual research.

The artists working on this part were not even part of the Berlin Bohemia of the nineties, but they understand this very topic as the field of their research.

In the apron of the exhibition a longer stay of these artists is planned in Berlin.

With the comparative knowledge of the non-resident researcher the investigation will circle around structural similarities in the constitution of bohemian subcultures and the different aspects of self organization.

This part of the exhibition shall be seen less as a presentation of issue related topics, but as a subjective approach.

The investigations of the matter Berlin Mitte thus will carry aspects of their own agendas, their research, their projections and desires.

For this part of the exhibition there will be about 8-10 contributions, amongst others Bernadette Corporation (Paris/New York), Gardar E. Einarsson (New York/Berlin) and Matias Faldbakken (Oslo), Carissa Rodriguez and Jodi Busby (New York), Endre Aalrust, Janne Lervik and Andreas Dalen (Berlin) and Nils Norman (London).

3. Point of reference: New York, East Village 1993

The exhibition "Friesenwall 120 and works selected by Josef Strau and Stephan Dillemuth" took place 1993 in the Pat Hearn Gallery in New York.

In the front, the larger room, was an exhibition of works from of different artist, which was produced in the early eighties, almost 10 years earlier to the time of exhibition.

The selection was not representative for this special time period determined by bohemia, glamour and the unexpected success in a party-boom part of time.

What was intended however was, that it should exhibit a rather unexpected positive appropriation of the work by Strau and Dillemuth.

During the visits and interviews with the artists involved in the show the originally rather "sociological" interest changed to an interest in the very different nature of the objects themselves, their contents sometimes moving in opposite directions.

In a second, smaller part of the exhibition an "archive" was installed. It contained some work by Josef Strau and Stephan Dillemuth themselves, which they had brought along from Cologne, plus a very mixed collection from remainders of the New York eighties: Invitations, magazines, photocopied material videos.

Furthermore it contained documents of interviews and walks through the city (among others with Walter Robinson, Bill Sterling, Colin De Land, Rammelzee, Pat Hearn, Jim C, Kellerhan/Oppenheim, Daniel Buchholz).

From today's view point the archive appears to be interesting under two aspects, one is the critical discussion around gentrification and cultural production, and secondly we have source material to a historical phase of approximation between youth culture and art, which established the idea of Graffiti as a form of art.

For the exhibition the archive will be rearranged and updated.

The archive will be the methodical point of reference for the Berlin audience of the exhibition and a historical example of bohemia.

In this sense the archive will be made permeable in the direction of the Berlin of the nineties and linked content wise.