Palace / Palace (Palast der Republik / Berliner Stadtschloss)
2012
Styrofoam, copper adhesive lm, serigraphy board, foam core, FOREX® PVC sheets, honeycomb board,
medium-density berboard (MDF), found posters, acrylic paint.
Two objects: 250 x 150 x 145 cm and 235 x 110 x 35 cm.

Here one palace stands opposing the other — the Palast der Republik versus the Stadtschloss. Berlin has always been characterized by city building projects that seek to forge an identity for the city. In this vein, then, the Prussian kings, the Nazis, and the East German government, among others, all attempted to shape the city as a refection of their ideology and vision. Since the Wilhelminian era, it has been a tradition here to erase the legacy of the previous generation in order to create a new concept of history. The city buildings created throughout the various different epochs and forms of government are however left behind: elements of a city that has remained thoroughly heterogeneous to this day. With the exhibition title, I play on the attempt to homogenize the city’s image and to cleanse it of undesired relics: in the English translation of “Palast/Schloss” to “Palace/Palace,” the two terms are blurred, the sides become interchangeable and the political and ideological conflicts smoothed. For critics of the rebuilding of the Stadtschloss, however, the planned historicizing structure is a historical forgery, an anti-modern, Disneyfied façade that deliberately omits the 20th century to suggest a historical continuity that has never existed in this form.

Exhibition view:
Step Out of the Strange Light
Curators Krisztina Hunya and Melanie Roumiguière, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), 2021

Photographer: Jens Ziehe