Unstoppable Self-Movements at BLMK Cottbus: Experience GDR Photography Anew
Date and Time
Location
Price
About this Event
Mood
Venue Type
Photography as a Space of Freedom: Unstoppable Self-Movements in Cottbus
The exhibition Unstoppable Self-Movements. Art with Photography in the GDR at the Brandenburg State Museum of Modern Art – Diesel Power Plant Cottbus is dedicated to an idiosyncratic, experimental image practice of the 1980s. Here, photography does not appear as neutral documentation, but as material for self-assertion, self-expansion, and artistic boundary crossing.
A Different Photography of the GDR
Within the socially and politically constrained framework of the GDR, artists from various disciplines developed an alternative photography and a photography from below. Under the term art with photography, works were created that combined photographic processes with action, performance, body art, installation, and serial order. The image does not merely document a reality but questions, distorts, and reimagines it.
Image, Body, and Space in Motion
The examination of the works leads into image spaces full of friction, ambiguity, and poetic shifting. Staging, montage, and consciously anti-aesthetic impulses detach photography from familiar conventions. Serial image sequences, interventions, and open design processes extend the photographic image into a performative action space.
Artistic Positions Beyond the Official Image
Among the works on display are those by Claus Bach, Tina Bara, Micha Brendel, Kurt Buchwald, Klaus Elle, Irene Fischer, Thomas Florschuetz, Else Gabriel, Rainer Görß, Klaus Hähner-Springmühl, Wolf Kahlen, Matthias Leupold, Olaf Martens, Cornelia Schleime, Erasmus Schröter, and Gabriele Stötzer. Many of these positions were associated with subcultural developments and found dissemination in privately produced photo folders or semi-legal magazines.
Art Historical Context and Curation
The exhibition concept was developed by Christoph Tannert as an external curator. The exhibition highlights a frequently overlooked art history of late GDR and shows how experimental photography detached itself from the journalistic-documentary understanding of images. In dialogue with performance, installation, and conceptual art, photography becomes a medium of aesthetic and social self-assertion.
An Artistic Experience for Curious Eyes
The exhibition atmosphere thrives on the interplay between photographic precision, serial structure, and deliberately set irritations. Forms, bodies, and materials enter into new relationships; the exhibition space becomes a resonance field for questions of freedom, identity, and the power of images. This aesthetic experience opens cultural education not as dry knowledge transfer but as an immediate encounter with a resistant artistic direction.
Conclusion
Unstoppable Self-Movements welcomes visitors with a concentrated, visually layered landscape of works related to art with photography in the GDR. Anyone wishing to discover experimental photography, GDR art, performance, and the history of artistic freedom will experience a highly art-historical relevant exhibition at the Diesel Power Plant Cottbus. A visit is worthwhile to see these independent visual languages live and to directly experience their aesthetic power.
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: no official profile found
