Kathrin Becker, Displaced
Colleen Becker
Monuments inspire serious reflection on a communal past. Resonant with the sentiment "life is short, art is long," bronze busts, stone obelisks and neo-classical marbles–the typical stuff of memorials–fuse form and function to create permanent sites for personal reflection within public spaces. A recent Berlin exhibition entitled "Displaced" rearranged the syntax of the monument to ask the question: In what way can homage be paid to fragmentary or marginalized histories? To this end, curator Kathrin Becker of the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (NBK) invited six international artists to temporarily "intervene" within Berlin’s urban fabric, bringing the remote calamity of the former Yugoslavia to the present attention of its German neighbors, thus acknowledging a shared European tragedy. Conceived in conjunction with "De/construction of Monument," a Sarajevo-based organization, "Displaced" included the artists Maria Thereza Alves, Edgar Arceneaux, Danica Daki, ejla Kameri, Renate Stih and Frieder Schnock. Each artist, like Becker, spent time in the Bosnian capital, and each of their works commemorated the nearly forgotten events of a place and a society that no longer exist.
Produced through the relationship between text and site, Arceneaux’s Berlin and Sarajevo installation Star Coviek Brdo (Old Man Hill) consists of letter balloons tied to a destroyed and abandoned Sarajevo house, spelling out an English translation of his grandfather’s Serbian name. Inscribing his personal history onto the war-torn remains of a foreign domestic sanctuary, Arceneaux prompts us to recognize the fragility of genealogical lineage and the family circle. Reminiscent of the cliché "here today, gone tomorrow," the impermanence of his artwork is mimicked by the structure of the exhibit itself.
Reacting to the "capacity for ideological exploitation" within the act of marking history, Becker’s curatorial vision pits the ephemeral against the permanent. Indeed, "displaced" had no specific site. Stih and Schnock’s Living On–Weiterleben 1995/2005, for example, consisted of a two-week long column in the Berlin newspaper taz, in which they reprinted obituaries from a 1995 Sarajevo daily. At the opening, videos of the installations and events were on view in a gallery, but after a few hours, the space was closed and visitors were invited to Daki’s spoken-word performance across the street. When I returned to watch the videos, they were gone, eliminating documentation of the show and its artwork. In a sense, "displaced" points to a larger phenomenon: during the conflict, Yugoslavians purposefully destroyed cultural artifacts to eradicate material testimony to their society’s multi-ethnic heritage.
"Displaced" is as much a product of Becker’s curatorial agenda as it is the collective result of each artist’s response to her ideas. An unfortunate, but perhaps intentional, consequence of the appropriateness of the exhibit’s format to its theme is the fact that the works themselves are difficult to access. Deprived of physical form, only their concepts remain to circulate within public discourse–but like our fleeting attention to the war itself, only for the moment.
