On the site of Mies van der Rohe's November Revolution Monument, erected in 1926 and destroyed nine years later by the Nazi regime, curator and scholar Elisa R. Linn invites artist Ariane Müller to speak about her work Monument für Schröderstrasse (2005) and artist John Miller to present his lecture Public Art and The Law of Unintended Consequences.
Drawing on her research on counter-public spheres in the GDR and in the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall, Linn introduces both artists’ presentations with a reading on Sybille Bergemann’s Das Denkmal (The Monument, 1975–1986) as well as Das Gespenst verlässt Europa (The Ghost Leaves Europe, 1990) by late Heiner Müller and Sibylle Bergemann. In the following conversations, Linn and the artists discuss which political histories persist through the presence and absence of a monument, and how art reshapes the public sphere in this context.
As part of Nils Norman: Monument to a Monument to a Monument.
Ariane Müller will speak about her work Monument für Schröderstrasse (2005), which addresses the social and spatial practices that emerged in the post-socialist ruins after 1989 and have since disappeared through redevelopment and gentrification. Referring to Schröderstrasse, a temporary artist-run space in East Berlin that could no longer exist, Müller's work, which recreates elements of it inside a museum, transforms the logic of the commemorative monument itself by turning interior and exterior inside out. Its multiple doors and reconstructed environment suggest both the openness of self-organized spaces and the paradox of preserving them within a museum. How can (counter-)monuments, understood not merely as objects but as practices, sustain political utopias and enact the right to the city as a mode of co-producing urban space?
The event takes place at Monument to a Monument to a Monument on the site of the former Revolution Monument, Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery, Gudrunstr. 20, 10365 Berlin.
Participation is free, please register via info(at)miesvanderrohehaus.de.
The event is in German.
John Miller presents his lecture Public Art and The Law of Unintended Consequences, exploring public space as something contested rather than given. Tracing the unforeseen repercussions that emerge when artworks are confronted with everyday urban life, he examines how they take on lives of their own: becoming monuments, controversies, myths, or sites of collective memory, while acquiring commemorative, symbolic, and historical functions. Here, Miller considers how their meanings and effects can exceed, distort, or even contradict their creators’ intentions. What remains of public artworks after their political, material, or symbolic disappearance? And how do they continue to resonate through memory, loss, and historical change?
The event takes place at Monument to a Monument to a Monument on the site of the former Revolution Monument, Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery, Gudrunstr. 20, 10365 Berlin.
Participation is free, please register via info(at)miesvanderrohehaus.de.
The event is in English.