Unbraked Self-Movements at BLMK Cottbus: Experience Photography as Freedom
Date and Time
Location
Price
About this Event
Mood
Venue Type
Photography as a Space of Freedom: Unbraked Self-Movements in Cottbus
The Brandenburg State Museum of Modern Art in the Diesel Power Plant Cottbus dedicates the exhibition Unbraked Self-Movements. Art with Photography in the GDR to a distinctive visual language of the 1980s. The exhibition presents photography not as a neutral documentation, but as material for self-assertion, boundary crossing, and artistic self-expansion.
When Photography Becomes an Artistic Gesture
The focus is on the so-called art with photography: an interdisciplinary practice that combines photographic processes with action, performance, installation, body art, and serial image sequences. Artists developed image forms in the late GDR that did not simply depict external reality but staged, distorted, and redesigned it.
Subculture, Self-Assertion, and New Image Spaces
The exhibition illuminates movements of another photography and a grassroots photography. Many of these works were closely associated with subcultural developments and appeared in privately produced photo portfolios or semi-legal magazines. Montage, poetic distortion, serial order, and consciously anti-aesthetic impulses open up an art history beyond official image conventions.
Artistic Positions of the Late GDR
Works by Claus Bach, Tina Bara, Micha Brendel, Kurt Buchwald, Klaus Elle, Irene Fischer, Thomas Florschuetz, Else Gabriel, Klaus Hähner-Springmühl, Matthias Leupold, Olaf Martens, Cornelia Schleime, Erasmus Schröter, and Gabriele Stötzer are on display. The exhibition concept was developed by Christoph Tannert as an external curator and places the positions in an art-historical context within the tension field of author photography, neo-avant-garde, and subcultural image practices.
Aesthetic Experience in the Diesel Power Plant
The industrial architecture of the Diesel Power Plant provides a striking framework for concentrated examination of the works. Light, materiality, image sequence, and spatial effects enter into a dialogue. An exhibition atmosphere emerges in which photography becomes experienceable as a vibrant, resistant, and socially relevant medium. Cultural education is connected with a sensory encounter with painting, photography, installation, and performative ways of thinking.
The exhibition invites art enthusiasts to a visually strong engagement with freedom, body, memory, and self-design. Those who wish to experience the experimental photography of the GDR, its cultural contexts, and its still relevant question of individual freedom of expression directly should definitely attend this art experience at the Diesel Power Plant Cottbus live.
Official Channels of Brandenburg State Museum of Modern Art:
- Instagram: no official profile found
- Facebook: no official profile found
- YouTube: no official profile found
- Website: https://www.blmk.de
