Current
Originally used to identify soldiers in battle and ships in international waters, flags have represented large geographic territories since the rise of the nation-state beginning in the late eighteenth century. Like monuments and national anthems, they intend to create a sense of identity based on a shared past, present, and future.
Like many other governments, the communist countries of the twentieth century produced an abundance of flags and banners. They were omnipresent at military parades, sports events, and public gatherings. Apart from national flags, many organizations produced their own richly decorated flags and banners. The Wende Museum holds over 2,000 of these ornamental textiles in its collection.
However, not only the powers that be use flags and banners. Artists have repurposed flags to change or subvert their original meaning for decades, while protestors and counterculture movements worldwide have capitalized on their strong symbolic value and identity-shaping qualities. The Medium is the Message combines Cold War-era political flags from communist countries with contemporary artworks offering critical reflection on the here and now.
During an eleven-year period, from 1998 through 2009, Dutch photographer Martin Roemers photographed the structural and topographic remnants of the Cold War in both the East and West. His research took him to Russia, Poland, Czech Republic, Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, Great Britain, Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany, where he documented underground tunnels, abandoned army bases, military training areas, rotting tanks, and destroyed monuments.
Wars not only have consequences for people but also for architecture and landscape. While conducting “photographic archeological research” on these physical remains of the Cold War, Roemers seeks out stillness in derelict military infrastructure that slowly and steadily has been overtaken by nature. Traveling through former “enemy territory,” Roemers explores these rusting tanks and destroyed monuments with a medium-format camera. On both sides of the Iron Curtain, he finds nuclear shelters, air force bases, shooting ranges, rocket launch pads, border fences, and radar stations, all built with a shared sense of paranoia and hyper-alertness that still remains.
Relics of the Cold War is the reflection of a militant society that prepared itself for a global nuclear war that would have ensured its own demise. It is also a consideration of the will toward de-escalation.
The 20-square foot aluminum guardhouse that sat outside the ADN headquarters in East Berlin from 1971–92 is both an artifact of an atmosphere of mistrust and representative of past and current political protectionism. Artist Farrah Karapetian will turn this structure into a lighthouse, changing a gesture of suspicion into a gesture of welcome. The windows of the guardhouse will be tinted in a rainbow gradient encompassing all of the colors potentially included in national flags. Over the course of the Wende’s concurrent exhibition, The Medium is the Message: Flags and Banners, Karapetian will engage with the public about experiences they have had as migrants. As the stories accumulate and become available on the museum's website, the light inside the lighthouse will pause at the various colors associated with the flags of the respective national borders crossed. Rather than the finality of immigration, the artist's focus is the prevalence of migration, asking visitors: What experiences of welcome or mistrust have occurred as you have moved internationally? How have they colored your life in their wake?
Taking as its starting point ceramics from China’s porcelain capital of Jingdezhen, this exhibition explores the history and artistic production of the Cultural Revolution. It presents imagery from the period while investigating the circumstances of production, the relationship between art and ideology, and the agency of the artists working within restrictive frameworks. The exhibition also looks at the afterlife of the movement through contemporary art, wherein which Chinese artists have appropriated and adapted the iconic images from this period for their own use today.
Curated by Kathleen Reinhardt and first shown at the Albertinum Museum in Dresden, this exhibition is a living homage to the history of Mail Art and visual poetry and a recognition of their ongoing resonance.