Galerie M, Marzahn
On Wednesday 21 April one of the students at the school organised a trip for people to get the chance to visit her work in a gallery just outside of Berlin. Timea had been working with people living in Marzahn and wanted to show her work there too. A day before, an email was sent round on the IfREX mailing list with a few observations on the work from one of her colleagues:
What I saw was a somewhat fragmented afterimage of a long period of interaction between immigrants who stranded in Marzahn and Timea. The majority of the communities Timea got involved with where Vietnamese. This reminded me of the project ‘Reorient’ that has represented Hungary on the 2006 Venice Biennale of Architecture. Reorient had put enormous effort and time into mapping Chinese communities in Budapest just to find how impossible this undertaking was. After Reorient fell flat due to the impenetrability of the closed world of this huge immigrant community, they even had to come up with a plan-B that they were able to exhibit something.
Timea however was able find out a lot about the stories and the dreams of the people she worked with. What she presents I think is a model of this somewhat displaced life of former East German Vietnamese people making themselves at home in the concrete jungle of Marzahn. Listening to three generations of Vietnamese woman singing to a communist karaoke DVD at the opening certainly displaced me in space and time.
Although rather figurative, the work was interesting in how Timea had engaged with a heterogeneous immigrant community and been able to put together a series of works with their help, on the ground floor of a tower-block. This raised the question of how the work might travel, even if it was ‘only’ to the centre of Berlin. One suggestion was to have a round-way bus service as part of the artwork, which would ferry people from Berlin city-centre out to Galerie M, but also allow those who live in Marzahn to travel in to visit exhibitions or galleries that they might not otherwise get the chance to see.
One of the videos, part of the show, was a split-screen story where you would see the same room on both sides, but on one side it would be inhabited and lively, and the other bare and empty (except for some hidden traces, a theme which animated another work in the gallery). The camera would pan around the room before moving on to another room and the next and so on. However, the empty rooms started to appear on the other side after a while, and vice versa, and it was no longer clear whether the people we could see were moving in or out of the accommodation: pure transition. The slightly different speeds of the panning cameras created a rather unsettling perception that the split in the screen was moving from its central point to both the left and the right, but also seemed to indicate the different sorts of rhythms that create and produce a space. Upstairs from the gallery was an exhibition on Marzahn and art in large-scale housing projects which was also well worth a visit.
The trip to Marzahn, it had been hoped, would serve not only as a chance to see and respond to a student’s work but also as an opportunity to discuss various issues which had been raised at the transparency talk the week before, in preparation for the following day’s round-table discussion with Olafur. This did not materialise quite as planned, with the group disbanding before any decisions were made…