Deutsches Historisches Museum - Verf�hrung Freiheit. Kunst in Europa seit 1945 - Blog

Henry Meyric Huges lives in London. The first contact with him is always with E-mail and it is soon clear that he answers his E-mail more quickly than anyone else on the Desire for Freedom team. And he writes wonderful E-mails at that. The team members who have not had a chance to meet him personally are enthralled about his British courtesy and understatement. We met him for the first time shortly before the exhibition opening. It reinforced our digital impression and that despite his quite impressive biography (understatement): Director of the Hayward Gallery in London, founding member and President of Manifesta, President of the International Art Critics Association AICA, and recipient of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. And he speaks fluent German. 

Edith Michelsen and Regina Gelbert’s office space is located in structure between both the administrative and exhibition buildings. This architectural ‘in-between’ corresponds well with the work they do. They are the interface between the exhibition objects and the people creating and installing the exhibition. They accompany and document every movement that an object makes during the entire exhibition process, whether while the artwork is underway from Paris to Berlin, stored in the museum’s temporary depot, being unpacked and installed in the exhibition space, or being removed for return to the lender. 

The rooms in the exhibition have names, such as ‘We are the Revolution’, ’99 Cent’, ‘A Hundred Years’, or ‘The Realities of Politics’. A room title that not only mystified some visitors, but also some of our own staff is from the third room, ‘Journey into Wonderland’. The works presented here range from Damien Hirst’s Dead End Jobs to Anselm Kiefer’s Heroische Sinnbilder (Heroic Symbols), Günther Uecker’s Kriegssarg (War Coffin), and Armando’s Schuldige Landschaft (Guilty Landscape). They focus on how to deal with remembrance, especially after the Second World War.

But what does that have do with a ‘land of wonder’? 

The British artists (and twins) Jane and Louis Wilson took their large-format photographs at the former East German state security remand detention centre in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen in 1997. The building, which is now the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial, was mainly used to intern political prisoners, dissidents, and people wanting to emigrate.

With their title, Stasi City, the artists point to the infrastructural character of this prison. At the point of their imprisonment there, many prisoners did not even know where they were, or whether they were even still in Berlin.  

There are many hundreds of thousands of objects in the German Historical Museum (DHM) collections. They are the source of many of the objects in the museum’s permanent exhibition and many special exhibitions. The Desire for Freedom, however, is an exhibition with objects from across Europe and beyond. Organising and coordinating these loans and ensuring their safe arrival at the museum (and departure afterwards) is the job of our project manager, Rania Sid Otmane. With Berlin being only the first destination for the artworks from elsewhere, her work will continue without interruption. In February it is again ‘time to travel’, this time to Milan.