On Oct. 5, 2023, Arwed Messmer will discuss with Prof. Dr. Thomas Macho, Cultural Scientist/ Director IFK Vienna, and Anna Voswinckel, Camera Austria, his book Clearing the Depths. The Dream of the Reich. In it, he turns to his photographic archive to look back at the profound upheavals in East Germany and Berlin following reunification in 1990.
Start: 7 pm
Admission: free
Photographs by Arwed Messmer
With texts by Falk Haberkorn, Maren Lübbke-Tidow and Arwed Messmer
TEXT EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK Clearing the Depths. The Dream of the Reich:
In Clearing the Depths. The Dream of the Reich Arwed Messmer explores his own photographic archive. His previous projects with photo collections from police, military, and urban planning depositories plumbed the depths of German history. Now he takes his own look at the deep transformation of East Germany and Berlin that followed the unification of the two German states in 1990. Alongside photographs of the reforming of Berlin, which in particular document the tearing down of buildings of GDR postwar modernism, Messmer also shows strangely monotone rural landscapes at a moment of transition prior to their frequently highly disruptive redesign. He draws on largely unpublished photos, re-edits existing groups of works, and relates these different series to one another. Seen as a whole, these pictures clearly illustrate problematic approaches to German history that today again confront us with a return of nationalist ideologies.
