Birgit Schlieps
09 Feb - 06 Apr 2013
BIRGIT SCHLIEPS
Wüstenstadt (Desert City)
9 February - 6 April 2013
What do desert cities look like? Berliners seem to have the answer to that. Just a few years after its completion in 1925, a housing development located in Berlin-Staaken that was designed by architect Erwin Anton Gutkind was given the name Neu- Jerusalem (New Jerusalem). With its white flat roof cubes, the buildings were similar to the buildings from StuttgartÕs Weißenhofsiedlung, which critics mocked as "suburb of Jerusalem".
In the last twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, talk has often turned to the urban desert. What some considered free spaces for multiple use was for others merely land awaiting construction. Now a new desert seems to be spreading, as Niklas Maak for example recently described in a FAZ article asking, "What's happening to our cities?", when state-owned property is sold to the highest bidder and converted in private luxury developments. The Neu-Jerusalsem development near the former Staaken airship field and Döberitzer Heide has also been sold to an investor by Berlin's Liegenschaftsfond, which took possession of the settlement after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The Berlin artist Birgit Schlieps focuses on urban space as a phantom, a myth and a construction with various media such as photography, video, text, drawings, and situational installations. In this exhibition at Galerie Zwinger, she presents an environment as a distant echo of this area between the Berlin Ringautobahn and what was formerly the West Berlin city boundary. What is on view is the act of seeing itself and its simultaneous disruption. The paper Filmkurier wrote the following about the shooting of the silent film classic Metropolis, which took place in part at one of the Staaken zeppelin hangars, "The combination of construction and nature, simply by way of opening the large hangar doors and photograph against the free horizon, is extraordinarily pleasant. In various films, this has been used, and the deception is complete." (Film-Kurier 118, May 20, 1925)
Wüstenstadt (Desert City)
9 February - 6 April 2013
What do desert cities look like? Berliners seem to have the answer to that. Just a few years after its completion in 1925, a housing development located in Berlin-Staaken that was designed by architect Erwin Anton Gutkind was given the name Neu- Jerusalem (New Jerusalem). With its white flat roof cubes, the buildings were similar to the buildings from StuttgartÕs Weißenhofsiedlung, which critics mocked as "suburb of Jerusalem".
In the last twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, talk has often turned to the urban desert. What some considered free spaces for multiple use was for others merely land awaiting construction. Now a new desert seems to be spreading, as Niklas Maak for example recently described in a FAZ article asking, "What's happening to our cities?", when state-owned property is sold to the highest bidder and converted in private luxury developments. The Neu-Jerusalsem development near the former Staaken airship field and Döberitzer Heide has also been sold to an investor by Berlin's Liegenschaftsfond, which took possession of the settlement after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The Berlin artist Birgit Schlieps focuses on urban space as a phantom, a myth and a construction with various media such as photography, video, text, drawings, and situational installations. In this exhibition at Galerie Zwinger, she presents an environment as a distant echo of this area between the Berlin Ringautobahn and what was formerly the West Berlin city boundary. What is on view is the act of seeing itself and its simultaneous disruption. The paper Filmkurier wrote the following about the shooting of the silent film classic Metropolis, which took place in part at one of the Staaken zeppelin hangars, "The combination of construction and nature, simply by way of opening the large hangar doors and photograph against the free horizon, is extraordinarily pleasant. In various films, this has been used, and the deception is complete." (Film-Kurier 118, May 20, 1925)