Rauschen: Echoes of an Institution

In March 1990, internationally renowned American artist Robert Rauschenberg opened his exhibition project ROCI at the Neue Berliner Galerie im Alten Museum, from where it was set to tour the world. The exhibition was originally scheduled for 1989 in East and West Berlin simultaneously, but this plan was not approved by the GDR’s[MB1]  Ministry of Culture. The project was put on hold indefinitely, until Rauschenberg’s assistant Donald Saff met Dr. Wolfgang Polak, director of the ZfK, in New York – just as the Berlin Wall was coming down.

Since 2023, the artist Nadja Abt has been researching ROCI in Berlin and New York. Developed in collaboration with the artist Katharina Marszewski, her presentation examines historical materials such as Rauschenberg’s video footage from within her own artistic perspective. Through language, detailed recordings and creative reimaginings, they contemplate Berlin and how profoundly it has changed since ROCI, immersing viewers in the city’s trajectory.     

Berlin-based artist Anna Bromley’s new production Vagant Orient (Orient Drifters) is dedicated to the late 1970s and early 1980s – and the interconnected trade and cultural relationships the GDR fostered with Arab states during this period. After East German Cultural and Information Centres (Kultur- und Informationszentren or KIZ) had been established as foreign policy outposts in non-socialist cities such as Helsinki, Stockholm, Khartoum, Dar es Salaam, Baghdad, Cairo and Damascus, the ZfK was now also responsible for representing the GDR’s cultural policy abroad. In September 1978, two weeks after HAP Grieshaber’s exhibition in East Berlin had closed, a 25-floor office building opened at Friedrichstraße train station – in the direct vicinity of the ZfK’s Galerie am Weidendamm. The building housed the International Trade Centre (Internationales Handelszentrum or IHZ), which was intended to help portray East Berlin as a modern industrial hub – also in terms of design. Western companies and GDR export enterprises both operated under its roof, unified by the architectural aesthetic known as the International Style. Arabic-language foreign trade magazines published in the GDR featured woodcuts by Werner Schinko alongside advertisements for state-owned enterprises. Drawing in part from the estate of her father, who worked as one of the GDR’s “travel cadres” in Syria and Algeria, among other countries, Anna Bromley’s installation traces these confluences.

Leipzig-based Artist Suse Weber’s explorations of the ZfK’s collection led her to reassess Werner Schinko’s oeuvre through a contemporary lens. His illustrations for schoolbooks and children’s literature were some of the most widely used illustrations in the GDR’s educational programme. Weber unfolds a new perspective on these images and their motifs (as well as their motives) in her installation titled Knüppel aus dem Sack (The Cudgel in the Sack), which takes the form of a larger-than-life cross-section of a mechanical drill – a sculptural tool that makes visible processes of overwriting and being overwritten. The exhibition presents this model in three phases, while the actual drill core is shown in Dresden.

Aside from producing exhibitions within East Germany and abroad, the ZfK was responsible for organising major events such as international art biennials. 1977 was the first and only year that the GDR was represented at the documenta in Kassel. This was due to a political shift following Erich Honecker’s new cultural policy credo of Weite und Vielfalt, or “breadth and diversity”. The GDR participated in the Venice Biennial five times in total, from 1982 to 1990. Next to the Federal Republic of Germany, which continued to exhibit at the German pavilion, the GDR was featured either as a national section in the Arsenale’s main pavilion or as a guest of the Italian Venice Pavilion. This exhibition revisits the GDR’s first presentation in 1982, based on artworks by Heidrun Hegewald and Uwe Pfeifer shown that year in Venice. 

 [MB1]Also nicht dem Kulturministerium der BRD, richtig?