From Far Away. Images of the GDR

Curator: Dr. Sabine Schmid

With works by Tina Bara, Seiichi Furuya, Tamami Iinuma, Sven Johne, Jens Klein, Jürgen Kuttner, Christian Lange, Emanuel Mathias, Katrin Mayer, Simon Menner, Einar Schleef, Christine Schlegel, Joachim Schmid, Erasmus Schröter, Maya Schweizer, Gabriele Stötzer, Paul Alexander Stolle, Elisabeth Tonnard, Andreas Trogisch, Joerg Waehner, and Ulrich Wüst.

The group exhibition From Far Away. Images of the GDR features photographs from, and about, the GDR. The works on display are photographs by others and of their own (used again) that the artists have appropriated and rereleased for fresh viewing. Some of these works go beyond appropriation on the visual plane to interlock image and text in transmedial approaches, using one as the foil to the other and vice versa.

The strategies deployed for making appropriated pictures visible and legible enable a wide range of subjects to be touched on: be it a view of an artist’s own biography and, therefore, often his or her own photographic work (with biographical links); be it dealing with sought and found images, such as picture postcards made from genuine photos, or photographs from the State Security Service dossier archives, private archives, and GDR publications (books, promotional catalogues, newspapers). Detached from their original contexts, these pictures have been enlarged, reconfigured, transposed to other aesthetic and semantic contexts, and, finally, released for interpretation. Thus they generate questions about the spaces they once occupied and about their epistemic value: What do these pictures tell? Do they give answers? If so, to what questions?

All these pictures tell of places and situations as they once were. Nonetheless, the question arises of what reality a picture represents, especially when new, different relationships are created between images through artistic intervention. Dealing with the visual legacy of the GDR means not only revealing traces of reality going back to a time past: The exhibition is less concerned with the production of pictures and their potential for recording snippets from space and time than it is with the stores of knowledge they conceal and their multiple meanings. The specific contexts in which the photographs were taken and the times at which they were shot are visible, yet, most importantly, the question arises of how they are to be further dealt with and to which other semantic planes they have been, and are being, transported.

The eighteen artistic positions highlighted by the exhibition cover the years 1981 to 2019; films, readings, and performances supplement the show as temporary projects. There is also an accompanying bilingual catalogue, published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln. Edited by Michael Buhrs and Sabine Schmid, it contains texts by Annett Gröschner, Vanessa Joan Müller, Sabine Schmid, and Christoph Tannert as well as texts and pictures by the artists themselves.

Friday Late, first Friday every month, 11am to 10pm

Press contact: Museum Villa Stuck, presse.villastuck@muenchen.de