Empty Pedestals / Removed Monuments

Leere Sockel / Entfernte Monumente

(empty pedestals /removed monuments)

Video, Fotografie, Installation

Duration: 23th March – 15th April 2018

Artists:
Tina Griffith, János Brückner, Nicole Marc, Constanza Rossi, Gözde Güngör, Marlene Bart, Marisa Benjamin

Initiator: Dr. Lisa Glauer

a cooperation project between:

Institut für Kunst im Kontext / Universität der Künste Berlin

Charité Mitte von Berlin

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Opening Times: thursday – sunday  3-7 pm
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The Organ of Critical Arts is presenting work developed within the des Seminar Empty Pedestals, Removed Monuments at the Institute for Art in Context of the University of the Arts, Berlin. Tina Griffith, János Brückner, Nicole Marc, Constanza Rossi, Marlene Bart, Marisa Benjamin snd Gözde Güngör worked on the theme of removed monuments that can be found all over memory landscapes and cultural geographies. Often the desire is voiced to mark these changes, to comment on them or to make them visible, or with a sort of copy paste, to reverse the removal. The artists explore what extended and possibly entirely different possibilities might exist, to react to the empty pedestals, beyond the desire, to imagine wholeness where it has been disrupted. How can these other, new, expanded and possibly less monumental ideas me communicated? As case study scenarios were developed for the empty pedestal of Carl Westphal. Carl Westphal, was a Jewish scientist, psychiatrist and neurologist who worked for the Charité Berlin and died in 1890. He was the first to describe homosexuality scientifically, which at the time was considered to be a psychic disorder. The bust in honor of Westphal was destroyed during National Socialism and the pedestal buried on the campus. During the GDR, the column was taken out of the ground, but the bust was not recovered. What remains is the empty pedestal which served as starting point for the artistic investigations.

(the images are made by Tina Griffith)