Remarks the Stranger: Interventions at the Siedlung Schillerpark, Berlin-Wedding
Curator: Sunshine Wong
Artists: Karolina Freino, Alicja Karska&Aleksandra Went, Kama Sokolnicka, Zorka Wollny

The project is subsidized as part of the programme of the Polish Minister of Culture, Polish Presidency 2011
 

Young Polish artists on tour is a cycle presenting the works of young Polish artists in European capital cities, which in 2011 was held in Berlin and Madrid. The aim of the project is to promote young artists on the one hand, and on the other to ask the question of how art can affect the image of our countryPlaces do not tell stories; people do. Like everything else in the world, they possess only a temporal currency which invites human narratives and meanings to gradually form around them. The cultural significance of a place is therefore an attributed one, derived from personal experiences that offer varied, innumerous readings. In Remarks the Stranger, Siedlung Schillerpark is the location-vehicle for poetry and analysis. The confrontation between it and the person is infused by two instances of Otherness: the Siedlung (settlement), conceived as an idealistic, community-based housing alternative in a socially deprived quarter of Berlin; the Polish artist, cast as the foreign "stranger" who encounters a German space with her specific socio-historical references.

Situated in Wedding, the first phase of Siedlung Schillerpark (built between 1924 and 1930) was designed by Bruno Taut, whose goal of providing affordable, quality living spaces for all, was an architectural principle imported from public housing schemes in Amsterdam. The cluster of three-storey modernist brick buildings contains thoughtfully planned rooms with sunlit balconies, and its open, inclusive structure encloses spacious green areas for common use.

The latter provides both the subject and the milieu to a number of art actions that will take place over a two-day period in November, 2011. Privileging performative and experiential strategies over object-making virtuosity, the participating artists foreground site, audience testimony, and transience as crucial tension points in their practice. They belong to a young generation of creative producers in Poland emerging from a tenacious post-communist legacy into new, uncertain paradigms which, through critical and conceptual means, they are beginning to explore.

Karolina Freino, Elevation above everyday existance,  project visualization

contributors OpenStreetMap, CC-BY-SA
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www.creativecommons.org