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I have nine large-scale oil paintings and six collages currently on exhibition in Berlin, where they were first painted. I lived in Berlin from 1998 to 2001, and moved to New York City the week before the fateful September 11th. My boyfriend, who was flying with my work from Berlin a week later, landed in JFK, was interrogated, handcuffed, fingerprinted and sent back to Berlin. The paintings were impounded for almost a year before being released to me. It took my boyfriend three years to clear the mistake made by immigration that led to his deportation. |
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Traumulus – Kristen Schiele
I have nine large-scale oil paintings and six collages currently on exhibition in Berlin, where they were first painted. I lived in Berlin from 1998 to 2001, and moved to New York City the week before the fateful September 11th. My boyfriend, who was flying with my work from Berlin a week later, landed in JFK, was interrogated, handcuffed, fingerprinted and sent back to Berlin. The paintings were impounded for almost a year before being released to me. It took my boyfriend three years to clear the mistake made by immigration that led to his deportation. On all levels, this work reflects the paranoia of a new order and the hints of a paradigm shift in global politics, as felt by people on a personal level. Recently produced collages included in the exhibition continue to speak to the current political context.
Though I have a family history in Germany, the Eastern section of Berlin is a shock to encounter for any Westerner, especially at that time. The buildings were still scarred by bullet holes from the street-to-street combat and the low-flying plane attacks. The coal-heated apartments without showers were cheap and minimal, most having been abandoned for many years. Even with this cheap rent, you could still find a neighbor living in a tent on the roof. I had a studio in an artist collective on Ohm Strasse. I had 5000 square feet and paid $75 a month. I found (and continue to find) that a less commercialized city contributes to a sense of creative innovation and freedom from mass-marketed ideals.
I painted in oil paint on large canvases tacked onto the rough studio walls. The paintings are layered and scraped, dense with specific locations and objects from East Berlin neighborhoods. The city is tracked as part topography, part memory. They are expressionistic and filmic, highly influenced by Western academic training, street graffiti and architecture in varied levels of renovation. Spaces are psychologically expressive. There is a tension between what is and what has been. In the painting Excavation, Potsdamer Platz is literally a torn-up surface. At the time it was the biggest construction site on earth. The area was a sea of construction cranes. You could still walk over mounds of limestone rubble from the war, walk into the ripped open cross-section of a building that resembled a dollhouse. A Russian plane half-buried in the sand still stood outside a club called Tacheles. In the work, I wanted to capture the dense layering of the city, the reassignment of spaces and meaning. In the painting Reach, the information is set on top of itself. You can look through the mesh and see what was once there, the meaning suppressed and recreated to form the new space and time. The work is also highly nostalgic, with a hint of yearning for a sense of belonging. Planes, patterns, scenes of the Kaufhof in Alexanderplatz are all laid out in large format for you to walk into the space and puzzle over the objects. In the painting Broadcast, I have multiple surveillance cameras recording the scene in the painting. In 7up, there are Russian wallpaper patterns stamped out over a background scene of Eberswalderstrasse. Each story is unsure of the outcome. Figures are isolated or in the form of a dream. It is not until the recent collage works that you sense what we now know: the recruiting center, the political speech and isolated protest, it is a more fully realized state of affairs, a more obvious terror alert.
Currently, I am working in a studio near the World Trade Center site in a residency of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Center. I will continue work on the political and psychological subtext of culture, and hope to maintain my relationship with my life in Berlin and to return every summer whenever possible.
Kristen Schiele’s exhibition “Traumulus” was on view at Curators Without Borders this winter. Located in the newly bourgeoning gallery district on Brunnenstrasse in Mitte, this newly opened exhibition space, founded in 2006 by independent curator Sarah Belden, was established in order to create a platform for emerging curators, to foster transatlantic relationships within the art world and to create exhibition opportunities for artists from around the globe.
