Artistic Border Crossers in East and West Germany
The new special exhibition at museum FLUXUS+ is an experiment: positions of the artistic avant-garde in divided Germany are presented here together. Numerous loans of non-conformist works of art from the GDR complement the works of Western artists, for which museum FLUXUS+ stands programmatically.
Image gallery
museum FLUXUS+
The exhibition thus aims to show in an exemplary way how influential artists were in both parts of Germany, who shook up the aesthetic boundaries of established art production with their abstract, processual and documentary strategies, even if they reached very different publics.
Border crossings are therefore not only to be understood aesthetically, but above all politically.
These border crossings are to be understood as the central motif of a system-critical art in an all-German context, against a common historical background in search of a common identity. Music and poetry become visual art and happenings, a film becomes a processual sculpture, everyday objects become multiple works of art, art becomes politics and vice versa.
Against the background of very different biographies, a story of misunderstanding and appropriation, of rejection and sympathy is told by different publics and different understandings of the success of artistic strategies, which seems to dissolve into an uncertain future at the moment of reunification.
This exhibition poses the question: to what extent did the German/German division in the post-war period find expression in the manifestations of avant-garde art and was there a certain necessity in it to negotiate an all-German identity from a variety of points of view and to let it emerge anew?
FLUXUS+ nonconform shows the two parts of Germany as two sides of the same coin, the value of which has only begun to emerge since the transformation period of the 1990s and which continues to develop today through the new attention paid to the nonconformist art of the GDR.
Programme:
27 September 2023 at 7:00 p.m. | Panel Discussion
"Art from the GDR in the maelstrom of transformation in the 1980s/90s"
Contemporaries and experts will talk about their experiences and the state of research, and together they will try to reflect on memories against the background of current debates about an East German identity.
- Panel: Gunar Barthel (gallery owner, Berlin), Dr. Steffen Damm (media scientist, FU Berlin), Prof. Else Gabriel (artist, KH-Berlin Weißensee), Dr. Anja Tack (ZZF, Potsdam)
- Moderation: Dr. Philipp John (museum FLUXUS+,Potsdam)
