Location:

station urbaner kulturen/nGbK Hellersdorf, Auerbacher Ring 41, 12619 Berlin (Entrance: Kastanienboulevard, next to Lebenshilfe e.V.)

Artists:

Manfred Butzmann, Michele Galassi, Thierry Géhin, Sonya Schönberger, Sudden Starlings Collective, Sinta Werner/Markus Wüste

nGbK work group station urbaner kulturen:

Juan Camilo Alfonso, Jochen Becker, Eva Hertzsch, Constanze Musterer, Adam Page, Katharina Ziemke

The city is always growing and always decaying. Understanding the city as a process opens up moments for intervention and opportunities to actively shape a place to live.

The exhibition Open Archive for Urbanism – What is the city? What can it do? What should it do? is built around a modular library on the themes of the city, accommodation, neighborhoods, labor migration, large-scale housing projects, and periphery/center. Selected texts, studies, and publications offer a historical basis and show how places, societies, and neighborhoods are formed, up to the present. At the same time, they provide insights into current debates and research on urban development and city life.

Visitors are invited to use the library and to alter the way the books are ordered. These rearrangements create new contexts and viewpoints – becoming points of departure for conversations, discussions, and further questions.

Art supplements the open system of knowledge, facilitating direct experience and surprising perspectives. The approaches deployed here range from forensics to poetry to critical observation. From different viewpoints, the artists consider the city as an image and space of perception, as build architecture, as a framework of social relations, and as a surface for the projection of societal concepts and conflicts.

Thierry Géhin looks at transitional spaces and the relationship between inside and outside, visible and invisible, public and private – and the limited scope for individual creativity within predefined structures. By shifting viewpoints, Sinta Werner questions perceptions of architectural uniformity; using deliberately simple geometrical structures taken from our everyday environment, she makes clear that our knowledge of built forms makes impartial seeing almost impossible. By contrast, Michele Galassi presents a residential project for different lived realities, raising questions around forms of exclusion, adaptation, and opportunities in mainstream society.

The quasi-archaeological traces of the first inhabitants of the so-called Ostseeviertel in Neu-Hohenschönhausen, found by Sonya Schönberger tell the story of bygone visions, promises, and disappointments. With an approach between function, decorum, and appropriation, the Sudden Starlings Collective makes a physical study of the freestanding concrete partitions originally made by the East German artist Gertraude Pohl. Having lost none of their topicality, Manfred Butzmann’s posters refer to urban conflicts and processes of negotiation in urban space, reminding us that questions of public space, participation, and shaping the city are always also political questions.

In combination with the library, these works create an open archive of urban experience – a framework of research, artistic reflection, and public appropriation. With a varied program of events, it invites us to view the city not only as a given structure, but as an ongoing process of deliberation about what it is, what it can be – and what it should be.

Starting on July 25, an appendix to the exhibition will be on display in the storefront window.

PROGRAM

Opening
Sat, 18.4.26, 7.00–10.00 pm

Women Build – Female Architects in the GDR

Lecture and Discussion with Birgit Szepanski
Sat, 9.5.26, 5.00 pm

Although there were more female architects in the GDR than in the FRG—25% of architects in East Germany were women, compared to only about 10% in the West—the men were and remain better known: many are familiar with star architects like Hermann Henselmann, Ulrich Müther, and Wolf-Rüdiger Eisentraut. But which notable female architects from the GDR do we know, and what did they build? The gap in our knowledge and memory is a gender gap. It was difficult for female architects in the GDR to gain visibility alongside their male colleagues. Furthermore, the practice of building within state-run construction combines contributed to female architects being forgotten. Yet they played a key role in large-scale construction projects and also created their own innovative architectural projects. Women built housing estates and living spaces; they designed public squares and prestigious interiors. Artist and art historian Birgit Szepanski presents female architects of the GDR, their biographies, and their buildings, offering a feminist perspective on urban life in the GDR.

Birgit Szepanski is an artist and art historian. Her artistic-scholarly dissertation, Erzählte Stadt, was published by transcript. In her research-based art projects and her art education work, Szepanski advocates for the visibility of women and explores forgotten aspects of memory culture.

Inside or outside? On a shelter for homeless people with alcoholism
Talk with Michele Galassi and Lukas Lindner
Sat, 30.5.26, 5.00 pm

Flow Lines. Water Infrastructures, Ecological Transformations and Postsocialist Landscapes
Sat, 6.6.26, 6.00 pm

How do dams shape landscapes, memories and visions of the future? What traces do water infrastructures leave within ecological, social and political contexts?

The public event Flow Lines brings together artists, researchers and curators from Ukraine and Germany who engage with hydropower infrastructures, ecological transformations and postsocialist landscapes across Ukraine and the former GDR. Developed as part of a long-term research and artistic project, the contributions enter into dialogue with the exhibition Open Archive for Urbanism at station urbaner kulturen/nGbK Hellersdorf.

Flow Lines was initiated by Korsi Berlin e.V. and the Ukrainian Environmental Humanities Network (UEHN). Through field research in Cherkasy, archival work and artistic inquiry, the project explores the entanglements of water, infrastructure, memory and future imaginaries in different postsocialist contexts.

With: Anna Potyomkina and Oksana Pohrebennyk, Variable Name / Назва змінна (Valerie Karpan and Maryna Marinichenko), Alkistis Thomidou, Tinatin Gurgenidze, Oleksandra Pogrebnyak, Krzysztof Gutfrański
An event by Korsi Berlin e.V., the Ukrainian Environmental Humanities Network and station urbaner kulturen/nGbK Hellersdorf.

Flow Lines is part of the RHIZOM/RAZOM programme of the Ukrainian Institute in Germany. The programme is funded by the German Federal Foreign Office and implemented in cooperation with Insha Osvita.

Zingster Straße 25
Reading and Discussion with Sonya Schönberger
Sat, 13.6.26, 5.00 pm

Miete essen Seele auf
Thu, 2.7.26, 4.00 pm

4 pm: Guided tour through the exhibition “Open Archive for Urbanism – What Is the City? What Can it Do? What Should it Do?” at station urbaner kulturen/nGbK Hellersdorf, Auerbacher Ring 41, 12619 Berlin
5 pm: Reception in the foyer of Alice Salomon Hochschule, Alice-Salmon-Platz 5, 12627 Berlin, hosted by Re:Mensa
5:30 pm: Film screening in the Audimax at Alice Salomon Hochschule: “Miete essen Seele auf” (54 min./ Germany 2015) by Angelika Levi and Christoph Dreher (in German)

Followed by a discussion with Antje Schäfer (cinematographer and dramaturg); moderated by students from the seminar “The Documentary Essay Film – Cinematic Narratives in Turbulent Times” with Prof. Dr. Andrea Plöger (Alice Salomon Hochschule Berlin)

All the beauty and the bloodshed
Thu, 9.7.26, 4.00 pm

4 pm: Guided tour through the exhibition “Open Archive for Urbanism – What Is the City? What Can it Do? What Should it Do?” at station urbaner kulturen/nGbK Hellersdorf, Auerbacher Ring 41, 12619 Berlin
5 pm: Reception in the foyer of Alice Salomon Hochschule, Alice-Salmon-Platz 5, 12627 Berlin, hosted by Re:Mensa
5:30 pm: Film screening in the Audimax at Alice Salomon Hochschule: “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” (122 min./USA 2022/English with German subtitles) by Laura Poitras

Followed by a discussion with Laura Poitras, moderated by students from the seminar “The Documentary Essay Film—Cinematic Narratives in Turbulent Times” with Prof. Dr. Andrea Plöger (Alice Salomon Hochschule Berlin)

Through the lens of two social systems: Art in public spaces
Talk with Gertraude Pohl
Sat, 11.7.26, 5.00 pm

Gertraude Pohl is a visual artist and designer. She studied at the Weißensee Academy of Art and is one of the few female artists who played a key role in shaping the aesthetics of public art in the GDR. Her most significant projects included the collective development of the color and material concept for the Palace of the Republic and her design for its natural stone floor in the main foyer, the wall design for the VEB Stern-Radio factory in Berlin-Marzahn, and numerous murals for “Kinderkombination” children’s centers and public buildings. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, she addressed the disappearance and destruction of GDR art in public spaces.

Finissage
Sat, 11.7.26, 7.00–9.00 pm