Exhibition about the border between Germany and Poland

The German concept of the border, which has an inglorious origin in Europe, especially in the sense of isolation, is a loanword from Old Polish. “Border” comes from “Granizza”. A shared word, a meeting of languages, across borders.

The exhibition “On Sharing. Art on the (Polish-German) Border” in the ZAK Center for Contemporary Art in the Spandau Citadel is dedicated to the ambiguity and the complex aspects of sharing. Is it about separation or shared ownership? About exchange or separation? About overcoming borders or drawing borders?

History of the German-Polish border

In cooperation with the National Museum in Poznan, curators Burcu Dogramaci and Marta Smolińska present works by 28 international artists that illuminate, penetrate and counteract the concept and experiences of sharing as well as political, personal or humanitarian border issues.

Michael Kurzwelly expands the concept of borders by creating an entire new city and uses anarchic humor to ignore geographical and territorial power customs and claims to power. The center of the fantastic Słubfurt – the intermediate land in the Polish-German border area of ​​Słubice and Frankfurt/Oder – is a yurt, flagged and cartographically located in the middle of the states of Szczettinstan, Terra Incognita, Lebuser Land and Schlonsk, like two maps at the entrances to the nomadic tent symbolize.

A yurt as a center of power

Welcome to “Nowa Amerika”! The great and participatory project that the action artist has developed or founded since 1999 can be seen in the exhibition context as an installation with videos, insignia such as flags or a statesmanlike bust.

On the outer shell of the yurt, small monitors are grouped with videos of urban spaces, lonely, scrubby landscapes and people discussing or singing with each other, like the German-Polish choir singing the Nowa Amerika anthem in both languages. People crow because the heraldic animal of the reunited Słubfurt is the rooster.

Fourteen videos circle the interior of the yurt, in which people from different regions of the world sing traditional tunes. The voices and tones are so cleverly offset or blended that an intensely meandering sound is created. Limitless communication without cacophony.

Changing boundaries

Simona Koch’s work “Borders/Europe” visualizes the changeability of borders over the centuries. On a lead-grey background, white lines form contours that dissolve again, drawing new marks that also disappear or cast nebulous shadows, only to then condense into quick, short strokes like swarming vermin. In her wall-filling video projection, Koch uses animated pencil drawings based on historical maps to draw demarcation lines that have shaped, shifted, enlarged and reduced European countries in the past and up to the present. An abstract imagination of the continent’s changing history in reality.

The angel of history has had its day and has become a ghost in Georgia Krawiec’s “Dichotomy of Nests”, a protective spirit at best. In stereoscopes distributed around the room, we see people in their kitchens sitting on a chair with another chair next to it. In its apparent emptiness, shadows of another person slowly emerge. Relatives of the artist were photographed with a pinhole camera. Although they join them, they do not represent a clearly unifying counterpart due to the long exposure time.

In the photographs, the border line, similar to that of Silesia, runs right through the emigrant families on the western side and their families who remained in Poland on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain. Stories of division that make shared experiences traumatic to this day.

In Sonja Rammer’s glass map of Europe lying on the ground, tectonic shifts appear to be shifting and overlaying national borders, while Paul Pfarr has photographed tree trunks with barbed wire entwined around them like a climbing plant, eating its way deep into the bark.

For his video, the Berlin artist Fabian Knecht overcame the demarcation from China to North Korea with fireworks rockets and a map by the German-Syrian artist Manaf Halbouni rearranged “The Protectorate of Bavaria” in color and covered it with Arabic characters. “What If?” is the name of the series that leaves us to boldly imagine what a Europe under an Arab colonial power would look like and what subsets there would be.