Bleib jeder Grenzüberschritt

ist dieses nachvollzogene Ritual

Einer Abnabelung[1]

“The (Berlin) Wall was the condom of the GDR,” states Deutsche AIDS-Hilfe in 1990, picking up on a metaphor that had long been familiar in the German Democratic Republic. The so-called “anti-fascist protective wall” was intended to ward off external influences from the “Western class enemy” and prevent escape but also to shield the country from allegedly “contagious” influences from within. However, the metaphor of the condom is ultimately misleading: the Wall was both a militarized border and a "semi-permeable membrane"—porous not only to AIDS but also to border crossers, their identities, desires, and ways of thinking, which created in-between spaces for alternative (counter-)publics.

The exhibition explores the impact of borders on the formation of counter-publics at the intersection of art, literature, and activism in the GDR during and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It features artistic works, lyrical texts, archival materials, and “a library from below.” It asks how artists developed a mode of “border thinking” (Gloria Anzaldúa/Walter Mignolo)—a way of thinking about and across the border between ideologies, languages, identities, and normative understandings of the body, sexuality, and civic belonging. How did this way of thinking enable them to resist the architectures of state representation and subjectification, as well as the “scissors in their heads,” that is, inner self-censorship?

The contributions to this exhibition make borders visible—whether physical, ideological, bodily, cultural, or media-based—and transcend and occupy them as diasporic sites of articulation. These aesthetic strategies unfold in public, semi-public, or intimate spaces, sometimes subverting official iconographies of identity—such as socialist realism’s vision of the “new man” promoted by the GDR state. Others search for the liberating word in lyrical and narrative texts, where ambiguity becomes a tool for metamorphosis and “becoming-minor” as generative strategies of resistance against discursive silencing. Some artists use autonomous, often illicit, approaches to new media—creating “intermediate transgressions” through short film experiments that occupy legal gray zones. Others pursue performative, actionist, and photographic explorations of the body as a political space. Still others confront colonialist, de-subjectifying ascriptions of otherness with artistic obstinacy and subjective expression—beyond their official daily routine as contract workers in a so-called “brother country.”

The contributions gathered in the exhibition navigate between precisely this autonomy and confinement in condensed space, between repulsion and sexual desire, and between community and experiences of isolation and exile. In doing so, they encourage us to understand the transcendence and migration from one place, one identity, or one gender to another, not only as a state of emergency, a moment of alienation, or a potential threat. Instead, they encourage us to invalidate boundaries, to reappropriate them, to locate them in favor of their liminality, and to go beyond territorial and categorical ways of thinking.

Far from attempting to provide a linear, comprehensive overview, the exhibition explores the aesthetic potential of these contributions from the subjective perspective of a post-reunification generation: as nonconformist practices that devised alternative artistic forms of life, action, and democratic community, thereby sometimes questioning conformity to the norms and property relations of West Germany's patriarchal capitalist society. What potential do these practices hold today, at a time when nativism and isolationism are increasingly underpinning the realpolitik of a supposedly “strong,” united Germany?

[1] Lubinetzki, Raja (2019): Der barfußne Tag. Gedichte. Berlin: Distillery Verlag, S. 4.