Beyond Borders
ab 3. Oktober
| English, German |
| 3rd floor |
The temporary exhibition Über Grenzen (Across Borders) focuses on the international (cultural) political and artistic relations of the GDR with friendly socialist states and their after-effects in the present.
Complementary to the annual focus of the Humboldt Forum Hin und weg. The Palace of the Republic is Present, conceived by the curator for modern and contemporary art at the Museum of Asian Art and the Ethnological Museum of the National Museums in Berlin, the temporary exhibition Über Grenzen (Across Borders) opens up a differentiated spectrum in an interplay of artistic positions and archive materials: It ranges from the GDR’s official foreign cultural policy towards its friendly socialist states and liberation movements in Asia, Africa and the Americas to the (image) politics of intergraphics and the stories of migration and the associated (post-)migrant cultures of remembrance and transformations after 1989.
Individual experiences and collective history are conveyed in the exhibition through artistic works and groups of works by Maithu Bùi, Seiichi Furuya Mio Okido, Minh Duc Pham and Su-Ran Sichling. Collages and drawings by the artist Mio Okido touch on questions of cultural memory and sometimes conflicting practices of remembrance in the GDR and FRG. The works of photographer Seiichi Furuya deal with the collapse of individual and collective events. Arranged in a loose hanging, he shows city shots and interior views of East Berlin from 1985 to 1987.
Su-Ran Sichling’s material-conscious works are an examination of demarcation and permeability, social standardization and exclusion. Her series Gelehrtensteine (Scholars’ Stones) is reminiscent of the East Asian tradition of naturally formed rocks as objects of contemplation, but was created from materials of East German post-war modernism. Minh Duc Pham and Maithu Bùi also adopt the connotation of materials in their works to reflect associations and references to the immigration history of contract workers from Vietnam and the conditions of their residence status.
Cultural-political and international exchange relationships are presented in a documentary-archival module on intergraphics and can be researched there. Intergrafik, the international graphic art exhibition, was first held in 1965 to mark the 20th anniversary of the end of the Second World War and was organized as a triennial by the Central Board of the Association of Visual Artists from 1967. Exhibition focuses such as 1967, for example, artistic positions against the war in Vietnam and a focus on the work of Käthe Kollwitz or the participation of ANC/South Africa, Algeria, Bangladesh, Oman and Tanzania in 1973 underline the cultural-political orientation of Intergrafik.
A temporary exhibition of the Ethnologisches Museum and the Museum für Asiatische Kunst der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz in cooperation with the Stiftung Humboldt Forum im Berliner Schloss and the artists Maithu Bùi, Seiichi Furuya, Mio Okido, Minh Duc Pham, Su-Ran Sichling.
Artists
was born in 1986 in Niigata, Japan, and lives and works in Berlin. Her preoccupation with the
ambivalent and often conflicting cultures of remembrance within East Asia has sharpened her focus on forms of remembrance and the differences in historical perspectives in Germany. This is where her two works come in: While her two-channel video work Ostdeutsch Migrantisch, created especially for ÜberGrenzen, is based on interviews and conversations on the diversification of memory culture in Germany and adopts a (post-) migrant perspective, the screen prints Die Erinnerung | The Memory. Ernst, Karl, Rosa Memory politics and the construction of a cultural memory. after 1989. Mio Okido studied for her bachelor’s degree at Tokyo University of Arts and at Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle. She continued her master’s studies at the Weißensee School of Art Berlin and the Berlin University of the Arts.
was born in Izu, Japan, in 1950. After graduating from Tokyo Polytechnic University, he traveled to Europe and settled in Graz in 1975. Between 1984 and 1987, he lived with his family, wife and son, as an interpreter for a Japanese construction company, first in Dresden and then in Hohenschönhausen in East Berlin. On October 7, 1985, the 36th anniversary of the founding of the GDR, his partner committed suicide; this unexpected coincidence of individual and collective events is reflected in his photo book Mémoiren, 1984-1987. ÜberGrenzen (and Furuya himself was a ‘border crosser’ between FRG and GDR) shows a selection of his photographs (“in Wolkenhängung”) as well as the photo book itself. These are photographs by an observer who is both involved and distanced, showing the last years of the socialist country in a sometimes surreal fade-in and documentary style. Furuya is one of the founding members of the photo magazine Camera Austria and has conceived numerous photo books and curated several exhibitions, especially on Japanese photography.
Her works are characterized by a very contemporary and conceptual, yet sensual approach to materialities and themes. She is a board member of Korientation, a (post-)migrant network for Asian-German perspectives. Born in Nuremberg in 1978, she studied sculpture at the HfBK Dresden after training in ceramics, where she still works today. ÜberGrenzen shows two interrelated groups of works by Su-Ran Sichling: fences and the series of scholars’ stones made of different, time-specific materials, which were characteristic of (East) German architecture (as were the metal fences): Strikingly shaped stones and rocks were called “scholars’ stones” in China and served as objects of contemplation. The work consists of several seemingly naturally grown stones on differently crafted pedestals. They are made of exposed aggregate concrete and terrazzo. Both materials are literally lifted onto a plinth. Exposed aggregate concrete and terrazzo are artificial materials that were used extensively in urban development in post-war Germany: Exposed aggregate concrete for making street furniture such as huge flower pots, benches or house facings; terrazzo as flooring in corridors and stairwells. Just as the composition and form of these materials suggest naturalness but are artificially produced, post-war German society is also not a natural entity but the result of social conditions, a social construct.