Von Ferne. Bilder zur DDR / From Far Away. Images of the GDR

"From Far Away. Images of the GDR" features photographs from, and about, the GDR. The works on display are photographs by others and of their own (used again) that the artists have appropriated and rereleased for fresh viewing. Some of these works go beyond appropriation on the visual plane to interlock image and text in transmedial approaches, using one as the foil to the other and vice versa. All these pictures tell of places and situations as they once were. Nonetheless, the question arises of what reality a picture represents, especially when new, different relationships are created between images through artistic intervention. Dealing with the visual legacy of the GDR means not only revealing traces of reality going back to a time past: The exhibition is less concerned with the production of pictures and their potential for recording snippets from space and time than it is with the stores of knowledge they conceal and their multiple meanings. The specific contexts in which the photographs were taken and the times at which they were shot are visible, yet, most importantly, the question arises of how they are to be further dealt with and to which other semantic planes they have been, and are being, transported. Artists: Tina Bara, Seiichi Furuya, Tamami Iinuma, Sven Johne, Jens Klein, Jürgen Kuttner, Christian Lange, Emanuel Mathias, Katrin Mayer, Simon Menner, Einar Schleef, Christine Schlegel, Joachim Schmid, Erasmus Schröter, Maya Schweizer, Gabriele Stötzer, Paul Alexander Stolle, Elisabeth Tonnard, Andreas Trogisch, Joerg Waehner, Ulrich Wüst Text: Michael Buhrs, Annett Gröschner, Vanessa Joan Müller, Sabine Schmid, Gabriele Stötzer, Christoph Tannert, u.a. von Buhrs, Michael