State of Control: Art Installation at the Stasi Headquarters

Normannenstrasse 19 in Berlin-Lichtenberg. The address is enough to send a chill down the spine: till 1989 it belonged to the headquarters of the MfS, the Ministry for State Security, or Stasi. 

Here, in a complex of grim-looking Plattenbau concrete buildings, a well-oiled administrative machine employed a staff of eighty thousand to keep the population of the DDR under constant surveillance. In January 1990, when the German government authorized the destruction of Stasi files, civil rights groups stormed the complex.  Graffiti on the walls ("Never again the SED Mafia" says one) still bears witness to the event. Since then, the building has been closed to the public, its starkly neon-lit hallways and meeting rooms echoing with silence.

For the first time since 1989, the building is once again open to the public. Stripped of all furniture but still haunted by its past, these large silent rooms were the perfect space for Thomas Kilpper's art installation "State of Control." 

"I was immediately inspired by the space," says Kilpper, an artist and sculptor from Stuttgart. "I found exactly what I was looking for." Kilpper converted the 800-square-meter floor of what was once the ministry's dining hall into a giant printing block. Etched into the linoleum floor are 92 images of divided Germany, for which Kilpper used a kind of woodcutting technique. First, he projected photographs onto the yellow/green linoleum, then cut into the outlines of the negative images. Finally, he ran  a black-ink roller over the surface, leaving the non-print surface in the original linoleum color.

The effect is striking. The images have been cut into the floor just as they have been sharply etched in the nation's memory. The three underlying themes are clear:  state security, resistance and terrorism. Only the lines of differentiation between them are deliberately left blurred. 

Silvio Berlusconi and John Heartfield. Photo: Jens Ziehe. Courtesy Neuer Berliner Kunstverein

I was lucky enough to visit with a historian friend who helped fill several gaps in my knowledge. For the most part, viewers are left to "read" images on their own. The floor map that accompanies the exhibition is difficult to follow, and the images don't have a chronological or thematic sequence.  Kilpper does not guide you with any kind of commentary. It is as if the artist says: See in your mind's eye that press photo from the 70s. Remember that image from a documentary film made twenty years ago. Or the popular movie released two years ago. Or the news headlines from four weeks ago. Remember and connect.

Willi Brandt and Günter Guillaume. Photo: Jens Ziehe. Courtesy Neuer Berliner Kunstverein

A Surreal Portrait Gallery

Before we knew it, we were treading over the first of Kilpper's linoleum-cuts: Erich Mielke, Minister of State Security and head of the Stasi till 1989, clinking champagne glasses with Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honecker. Toward the middle of the room is the high-ranking Stasi spy Günter Guillaume whispering into the ear of Chancellor Willy Brandt as though giving him the Judas kiss. Then there is French philosopher Michel Foucault giving a lecture at the Technische Universität Berlin in 1976; directly below him, an idyllic picnic scene in the DDR. Across from the picnickers are the protesters against the Pershing missiles; next to them, Erich Mielke again, this time dancing with his wife in the ballroom in the very building in which we stand. 

Kilpper lets the images, drawn from national and press archives as well as from his own private collection,  cluster in an intuitive rather than ordered way: "The whole constellation emerged like a labyrinthine blackberry bush," he said.

Just about four weeks ago, the case of Benno Ohnesorg, the student shot down in the 1968 demonstrations, was making national headlines when it was discovered that Karl-Heinz Kurras, the West Berlin police officer who shot him, was a Stasi agent. Clearly, Kilpper's themes reach from history into the present. In the end, though, this is more than a collection of images having to do with just the Stasi. "Instead," says Kilpper, " I wanted to show the fine line everywhere between resistance and terrorism."

While at Normannenstraße 19, don't overlook the opportunity of visiting the Stasi Museum, also in the same complex. The exhibition features a lot of explanatory text (all in German), but the still-palpable atmosphere of the powerful machinery of repression needs no translation. Mielke's office, the canteen and the conference room have all been preserved in their original state, and there are rooms full of operative technology for spying -- including a hidden camera in a birdhouse.

"State of Control" runs till 26 July 2009 at the former Ministerium für Staatssicherheit der DDR (MfS) at Normannenstraße 19, Berlin-Lichtenberg. Admission is free and staff on duty are happy to answer questions. Public Transportation: U5 to Magdalenenstr. 

The Stasi Museum is at Ruschestraße 103, Haus 1, 10365 Berlin. Admission is 4 EUR, reduced fee 3,50 EUR. Open Monday to Friday from 11:00 am to 6 pm, on Saturdays, Sundays and holidays from 2 pm to 6 pm.

Visions of our Time: Tenth Anniversary of the Deutsche Börse Photography Collection

Nikita Kruktunov and Rufina Muharanova, Omsk, May 2005. Picture: Simon Roberts/Courtesy Art Collection Deutsche Börse

"Visions of our Time" at C/O Berlin celebrates ten years of the Art Collection Deutsche Börse and features the work of the 4 nominees for the 2009 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. 

The prizewinning and shortlisted photographs take pride of place in the exhibition, but the more interesting section, at least in terms of technique and composition, may be the other half of the show: a group of 100 of the more than 700 works in the Deutsche Börse's collection of contemporary photography.

Filmic Haikus

Paul Graham is winner of the £30,000 award for his series named a shimmer of possibility after a collection of Chekov's short stories. Graham made an extended road trip across the US between 2004-06, taking pictures of everyday life. What interested him was not the one defining moment but sequences that capture simple human activities -- somebody lighting a cigarette, cutting grass or waiting for a bus. 

Graham's photographs are sequential shots of these single activities, and Graham likes to call them "haikus" rather than narratives.  Not much is happening in Graham's shots. They are often ad hoc pictures, sometimes badly lit, as in the sequence of the (homeless?) person selling a bunch of flowers, and mostly about no more than "being there." 

Archivist, Detective, Activist

Kuwaiti artist Emily Jacir is one of the three other nominees for the prize, and her featured work is "Material for a Film," a multimedia installation documenting the assassination of the Palestinian intellectual Wael Zuwaiter by Israeli agents in Rome in 1972. 

Jacir arranges photographs, texts and objects to piece together the story, and some stop you in your tracks -- such as the copy of the 1001 Arabian Nights Zuwaiter was carrying in his pocket when he was shot. Lodged in the cover is a bullet, the only one which did not pierce Zuwaiter's chest. 

Still, you can't help wondering what Jacir's work is doing in a photo exhibition. She is much more of an archivist than a photographer.

White Tiger

The White Tiger is the most well known of Taryn Simon's picture-and-text series entitled "American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar." Simon, another nominee for the prize, concentrates on images of contemporary America that tap into the hidden or darker sides of the culture, a kind of nationwide Discomfort Zone. 

The white tiger (Kenny) at the Arkansas zoo is a product of selective inbreeding, and he is physically and mentally malformed. Like Kenny, all of Simon's subjects are fascinating: the contraband room of the customs section of JFK Airport; a Braille edition of Playboy; a female patient undergoing hymenoplasty, a surgical procedure which masks the loss of virginity; and a bird's eye view of drums of nuclear waste under water. In the end, though, Simon's subjects may be more memorable than her use of the medium.

Adam and Eve in Central Park

Tod Papageorge is my favorite of the four shortlisted artists. His black-and-white series shot over twenty five years in Central Park is called "Passing Through Eden" and is based on the first six chapters of Genesis. 

Through Papageorge's lens, Central Park is transformed into a prelapsarian world. It's a familiar world (still recognizably New York of the 60s and 70s) but also strangely magical. As you walk by the pictures in the first half of the series it is not difficult to decode a sequence of Biblical references. The narrative then continues to unfold in the second half, and Papageorge's photographs seem able to encompass all of human life within the boundaries of the Park: its innocence, beauty, ugliness and mystery, but also its humor. 

Picture: Tod Papageorge/Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

I returned a couple of times to one particular photo -- in perfect symmetrical proportions -- of three men on a  park bench. The first is straddled by his girlfriend in an amorous embrace, the second is lost in his newspaper, the third is trying to decipher something on a slip of paper -- a shopping list? an incomprehensible bill?

On the upper floor are the 100 photographs from the rest of the collection, among which are some unforgettable images. I'll mention just three. First, the striking portraits of Seydou Keita, the photographer from Bamako, Mali, who never went to college, never saw the works of photographers outside his country, and never had a teacher. His clients, the simple people of his hometown in the 1950s, lined up outside his studio because Keita's portraits made them beautiful, and he gave each a touch of West African tradition.

Then, the portrait series called "Heads" by Philip-Lorca di Corcia, who marked a spot on the ground at Times Square, New York, mounted a camera and telephoto lens a long distance away, then released the shutter every time someone he found interesting walked over the spot. From the swirling life around the Square, the camera seizes his subjects while the background melts away, and the viewer sees a cross-section of New Yorkers as individuals in a moment of unawareness.

And finally, the selection of photos from British photographer Simon Robert's series called "Motherland,"  the result of his yearlong exploration of Russia, documenting the lives of local people through a vast sweep of the country. The proud gaze of the two young competition dancers from Siberia, the girl in a peacock blue dress, is one of the images that stayed with me.

"Visions of our Time" is at C/O Berlin, Oranienburger Straße 35/36, 10117 Berlin (S Oranienburger Straße) and runs till 19. July, 2009. Open everyday from 11 am to 8 pm. Tickets cost 7 Euro (reduced: 5 Euro). See www.co-berlin.com for more details.