THERE IS NO THERE THERE

In the organizer's words:

In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, numerous artists from abroad worked in both the GDR and the FRG. Within the framework of scholarships and bilateral cultural agreements, they came to divided Germany during the Cold War together with migrant workers, exiles and refugees to continue working on their art and to join forces and exchange ideas with other artists. Some are migrant workers and only become artists later.

Memories of people and landscapes, colors and forms as well as pictorial traditions find their way into their works. Flight and life in exile, which becomes their new home, political events and also everyday working and living life become their new pictorial themes.

Pushed to the margins of the institutionalized art world as a result of structural exclusion, the artists nevertheless decisively expanded the art discourses in both post-National Socialist Germanys. In this way, they open up the possibility of seeing differently and thus seeing differently.

The exhibition There is no there there testifies to the richness of this artistic creation and the transformative power that works of art can unleash. While what is left behind changes involuntarily, the artists directly alter the present.

Curated by Gürsoy Doğtaş and Susanne Pfeffer

Information in DGS