BERLIN.- An apartment slips within its architectural structure. Gradually, it sinks, floor by floor, until it threatens to disappear into the sewer system. Yet the building’s residents all ignore this mysterious transformation. The narrator in Ilse Aichinger’s short story ‘Wo ich wohne’ holds on to the hope, until the very end, that someone is finally going to break the silence: “Verzeihen Sie, aber wohnten Sie nicht gestern noch einen Stock höher?”
What kinds of structures shape the places we live and work in? What traces of use are inscribed within them and resonate beyond them? Aichinger’s ‘Wo ich wohne’ not only lends its title to this exhibition on the occasion of Haus am Waldsee’s 80th anniversary, but her story also points to the intersection between social conditions and built environments. This relationship is continually renegotiated in the programming which invites a productive friction between artistic interventions and the institution itself – its history and its architecture.
Wo ich wohne traces the history of the institution, which had its starting point in the villa built in 1922 for the Jewish textile manufacturer Hermann Knobloch and his family just weeks after the end of World War II. The building and its garden, once inhabited by both victims and perpetrators of National Socialism, is understood as an active material through which the works in the exhibition draw out the tensions between the private and the political. The works reveal that the violent events and social struggles of the past century still reverberate, throughout the building, its location, and in its use – even as the architecture speaks of an attempt at bourgeois separation, which clings ever so tight to an assumed normality while the world outside its windows begins to falter.
This international group exhibition unfolds within a spatial intervention by artist Richard Venlet. It brings together historical and new works by Nigin Beck, Rhea Dillon, Robert Haas, Hannah Höch, Patrick Jolley & Reynold Reynolds, Alexandre Khondji, Atiéna R. Kilfa, Henry Koerner, Yoora Park, Oskar Schlemmer, Renée Sintenis, Ian Waelder, and Frau von Zinowiew. Works from the institution’s early exhibition history enter into a dialogue with contemporary reinterpretations of the place. Fragments from the house’s history as an exhibition space and as a place of residence allude to its different modes of use and conjure atmospheres of the past in flashes of recollection.
Alongside, the exhibition series Since… continues in the café, the villa’s former garage, on a display structure designed by Georgian curator and archivist Nina Akhvlediani. Entitled Green Sanctuary (C.O.T.B), Veit Laurent Kurz presents the second chapter in the series, centring on the English landscape garden of the house.
In dialogue with the exhibitions, Ayumi Paul’s work Fischmond am Waldsee premieres in the garden. Conceived as a sound walk in the form of a radio play, the work is based on research of geological processes, migration paths of animals and plants, as well as historical and biographical memories.
Curated by Anna Gritz, Pia-Marie Remmers
