ERYSIMUM (WALLFLOWER) | Photo-video intervention at Kunsthaus Dahlem by Hinda Weiss and Avi Feldman
Erysimum (Wallflower) is a video and photography installation exploring how architecture, sculpture and the human figure – live and as portrayed in art – reflect on each other, construct and deconstruct a space through time. Within the specific history and context of the building of Kunsthaus Dahlem, Erysimum (Wallflower) is a reflection on how a building, constructed for an artist working in service of Nazi propaganda, changes its purpose and significance through time. Architecture, as described by Jennifer O’Donnell, is never neutral. It establishes “order in the lives of humans and can be made complicit in the perversion of that order”*. Like the Erysimum plant, able to grow and revel by sinking roots between brick and stones, the performative actions of our bodies are envisioned as an activist action creating cracks of new meanings in space.
The human figure and its range of gestures are a recurring theme within the space of Kunsthaus Dahlem – heroic to tragic, masculine to feminine, singular to part of a crowd. Drawing inspiration from these sculptural forms, their expressive postures, and their relation to the history of architecture, Weiss and Feldman investigate and engage in three forms of performative action. In and around the museum, Weiss’ body shifts between spectator and sculpture – contemplating the right to mobility, the presence of the feminine within masculinized spaces, and the illusionary quality of Trompe-l’œil. In video works disguised as a museum poster, they evoke reflections on the lives of former Dahlem residents. And in photographic works, in which Weiss’ rehearses sculptural gestures in front of classically inspired federal and academic buildings in New York City. These images are allowing a juxtaposition between a dark past and a horrifying present in which a reactionary US administration calls for a return to the past through Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture, and attacking scientific, academic and artistic freedoms.
Erysimum (Wallflower) will be accompanied by three tours given in German, English and Hebrew led by Hinda Weiss and Avi Feldman. The tours will be based on and related to the works of artists we are referring to in the installation.
Wallflower - The Tours
1. (out of 11)
TESTAMENT
And once my time is ended,
then bury Mühsam deep.
A little tear still granted,
a greeting to the grave is sent,
then place a stone of sleep:
Softly rot, my bones, in peace!
And when a year has passed away,
then you who limp and leap,
you drinking brothers!
Let joy abound this day!
A gleaming drop shall weep.
In memory of me: drink deep!
You must give me notice,
this is my final plea.
Raise high your brimming toasts:
Let my corpse live on in glee!
All sorrow now is through! —
Long live Mühsam! Long live Death too!
Erich Mühsam was born in 1878, in Berlin; raised in Lübeck, died on July 10, 1934, in the Oranienburg concentration camp; Burial at the Waldfriedhof Berlin Dahlem. He was an anarchist German writer, publicist, and antimilitarist. His activities and his brilliant ideas, expressed in his incomparable rhetoric, made him one of the most well known representatives of German anarchism.
Mühsam’s anarchist literature was unlike that produced by most other anarchist writers. Especially because he does not quote theoreticians to support his views. He sketched his depiction of anarchist ideology, which each person may add to or subtract from according to their inclination and by the reading of which they may fortify or challenge their own convictions.
(source: the anarchist library).
–
As written in the general text about our installation “Erysimum (Wallflower) is a video and photography installation exploring how architecture, sculpture and the human figure – live and as portrayed in art – reflect on each other, construct and deconstruct a space through time. Within the specific history and context of the building of Kunsthaus Dahlem, Erysimum (Wallflower) is a reflection on how a building, constructed for an artist working in service of Nazi propaganda, changes its purpose and significance through time.”
In this about 45 min tour we wish to share with you some of the artists, writers and thinkers that inspired us during our research into this specific space and history. It is not a suggested interpretation or explanation into the photography, videos and banners, but rather a collection of quotes and biographies of people who perhaps passed by this area, lived in Dahlem, buried not far from here, or some whom we imagine should have shared a space here.
Starting in the garden of the museum, close to the entrance, we see an image taken recently at The Low Memorial Library, a building at the center of Columbia University's Morningside Heights campus in Upper Manhattan in New York City.
–
Full tour text will be sent by request.
–
11. (out of 11)
Otto Warburg
“A man who knows nothing at all about engines, their structure and their purpose may discover the difference. He may, for example, smell it.” Otto Warburg, 1956, in response to a criticism of his hypothesis that cancer is a problem of energy.
Born in 1883 into the Warburg family, Otto Warburg lived and worked in Dahlem most of his life. Long before his death, Warburg was considered perhaps the greatest biochemist of the 20th century. In 1931, he won the Nobel Prize for his work on respiration. Records indicate that he would have won in 1944, had the Nazis not forbidden the acceptance of the Nobel by German citizens.
Otto Warburg was able to live in Germany and continue his research throughout World War II, despite having Jewish ancestry and being gay, which speaks to the German obsession with cancer in the first half of the 20th century. At the time, cancer was more prevalent in Germany than in almost any other nation. According to the Stanford historian Robert Proctor, A number of top Nazis, including Hitler, are believed to have harbored a particular dread of the disease. Whether Hitler was personally aware of Warburg’s research is unknown, but one of Warburg’s former colleagues wrote that several sources told him that “Hitler’s entourage” became convinced that “Warburg was the only scientist who offered a serious hope of producing a cure for cancer one day.”
After the war, the Russians approached Warburg and offered to erect a new institute in Moscow. It is said that Warburg told them with great pride that both Hitler and Stalin had failed to move him. As Warburg explained to his sister: “Ich war vor Hitler da” — “I was here before Hitler.”
(source: The New York Times Magazine)
This project was supported, in part, by a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant
And t by Artis’ Exhibition Grants
https://kunsthaus-dahlem.de/en/the-programm/10-years-weiss-and-feldman/