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

Greece is one of the European countries hit the hardest by the ongoing economic crisis. With co-curator Maro Psyrra we talked about the consequences of the crisis for the exhibition, the staff and the museum. On a lighter note we also chatted about her PhD, her favorite artists and one of her favorite pieces: an installation by Leda Papaconstantinou called ‘Genet’s Toaster’.  

More often than not, when people become really enthusiastic about something and they make it their passion and pursue this passion professionally, they can remember one moment in which all of that became clear to them.

For Alexios this moment was when he encountered Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ on the cover of a book. He was twelve or thirteen at the moment and remembers that that was the moment in which he decided he wanted to be in the arts professionally. As a professional viewer. For him ‘it was a funny coincidence that Duchamp’s last work was Étant donnés: 1 la chute d'eau / 2 le gaz d'éclairage’ - a work on viewing and voyeurism. 

The New York Times wrote in 1987 in an article titled ‘Berlin by Night’ that ‘John le Carré sends one of his characters in a melancholy mood to Berlin: “Scared of himself he hastened to a fashionable Greek nightclub he knew of, run by a woman of cosmopolitan wisdom”.’ This woman is Fofi and this is her story (and how we met her):  

Dear all,

we hope all of you had lovely holidays with family and friends and an equally lovely New Year’s Eve.

Our past year was filled with excitement, new friendships, exhibitions ending and new ones opening, lots of work but also lots of fun and we hope it was the same for you.

What all happened? 

Dark were the sides of the idea of liberty shown by the first exhibition ‚Vertigo of Freedom‘ at the CHB last year. This year it is the second basic democratic principle that moves exhibition and artists: égalité, equality.

The exhibition starts already outside on the façade of the CHB. There we read the ‘Partial Declaration of Human Wrongs’: