Unrestrained Self-Movements at the Diesel Power Plant Cottbus: Photography as a Space of Freedom
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Photography as a Space of Freedom in the Diesel Power Plant Cottbus
The exhibition Unrestrained Self-Movements. Art with Photography in the GDR focuses on a unique and long-underestimated image practice of the 1980s. In the Brandenburg State Museum for Modern Art, photography is not understood as neutral documentation, but as material for self-assertion, self-expansion, and artistic boundary-crossing.
A Different Photography of the GDR
In the tightly regulated society of the GDR, artists from various disciplines developed a subculturally influenced Art with Photography. The works on display break away from the journalistic-documentary understanding of images and reflect their own conditions. Staging, alienation, serial arrangement, and deliberate breaks transform the photographic image into an open space for thought and action.
Image, Body, and Space in Motion
The exhibition combines photography with performance, action, installation, and intervention. Image series, private photo albums, and semi-legal magazines testify to an art practice where aesthetic experience and social self-assertion directly intertwine. Body, cropping, repetition, and materiality become independent artistic means.
Artistic Positions Between Concept and Experiment
Works by Claus Bach, Tina Bara, Micha Brendel, Kurt Buchwald, Klaus Elle, Irene Fischer, Thomas Florschuetz, Else Gabriel, Wolf Kahlen, Matthias Leupold, Olaf Martens, Cornelia Schleime, Erasmus Schröter, and Gabriele Stötzer can be seen. Their diverse visual languages reveal how photography became a stage for self-design, poetic alienation, and visual autonomy in the late GDR.
Curating and Art Historical Context
The exhibition concept was developed by Christoph Tannert as an external curator. His perspective brings a historically relevant chapter of East German modernism to the forefront: the development of a non-state-sustaining art that evaded established categories and combined photographic methods with conceptual, performative, and installative strategies.
Art Experience in the Former Diesel Power Plant
The industrial architecture of the Diesel Power Plant Cottbus creates a concentrated exhibition atmosphere for these experimental works. Between rough spatial effects, photographic surfaces, and serial image sequences, an intense engagement with the works emerges. The art experience connects cultural education with an aesthetic experience that sustainably expands familiar notions of photography.
Conclusion: The exhibition opens a precise and sensual access to a resistant art practice of the late GDR. Art enthusiasts experience photography as action, attitude, and space of freedom. A visit to the Diesel Power Plant Cottbus enriches cultural perception and invites exploration of the works on-site.
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