Location:

Station of Urban Cultures, Auerbacher Ring 41, 12619 Berlin (entrance Kastanienboulevard, next to Lebenshilfe e.V.)

Artists:

Verena Hägler, Nicola Reiter

nGbK working group Station of Urban Cultures:

Jochen Becker, Eva Hertzsch, Margarete Kiss, Constanze Musterer, Adam Page, Katharina Ziemke

As part of EMOP Berlin – European Month of Photography

City and city limits, from urbanity to the periphery, from suburban settlements to the landscape – RAND brings together two projects from the field of landscape photography: SALTROAD by Verena Hägler and Agglomerations by Nicola Reiter. Both examine the changing landscapes along Munich’s city limits. Now the project is visiting Berlin-Hellersdorf, a district commonly perceived as far out, in the middle of nowhere, as an outlying district and a periphery. What is similar, what is different in the transition from the city to the suburbs, to the surrounding countryside? The site-specific installation at the station of urban cultures engages in dialogue with the surrounding area and its residents through photographs, projections, and sound, as well as texts and interventions in the outdoor space.

The two exhibited perspectives on Munich’s EDGE are characterized by different origins and are at times confrontational: For SALTROAD, Verena Hägler photographed a transit space in an agricultural setting on the outskirts of Munich. The photographic fragments form a mosaic that reflects the character of the area. A text section reflects personal aspects of living and the landscape in anonymous interviews with residents. Nicola Reiter investigated the edge of the city in agglomerations as an area of ​​transition from urban structures to the countryside. She walked around Munich along the city limits with her camera and supplemented her own series of images with historical photos that visualize changes. They depict a search for the relationships that develop between built space and landscape.

The publication RAND (Spector Books, 2022) is available in bookstores and locally.

Kindheitsmuster & Archivdialoge

Conversation with the artist, performer and social scientist Wenke Seemann about her book and exhibition project “Utopie Auf Platte” and the conceptual photographer Arwed Messmer
Moderation: Jochen Becker

As part of the exhibition RAND – At the transition from urban to rural by Verena Hägler & Nicola Reiter on Munich’s periphery, Wenke Seemann will take a contrasting look at the urban peripheries of northern Germany. Her childhood memories of Rostock’s large housing estates – from the adventure playground building site to the pogroms in Lichtenhagen – explore eastern modernity with postmodern methods.

In the estate of her father, who worked as an advertising photographer at VEB Schiffscommerz and had “banished” his dream of seafaring into thousands of photographs of “ships leaving port”, Seemann found ten moving boxes of photographic material. In them, she looked through pictures of the development of new housing estates in the northwest of Rostock in the 1970s and 1980s: “In these pictures, I saw something for the first time that I had never associated with East German prefabricated housing estates before: a spirit of awakening and renewal, a promise of modernity to my parents’ generation.”

In the project ‘Utopia on Record’, Wenke Seemann traces the promised and broken utopias of (Eastern) Modernism. Her approach of a precise artistic reading of family photographs, which she was only able to approach again posthumously and as massively edited material, pursues these promises.

In conversation with the photographer Arwed Messmer, who works on the “margins of the documentary”, his artistic-image-archaeological practice forms a concrete counterpart to the question of “archive dialogs”: How can an expedient photograph – commissioned by the state and held in public archives – for example on border installations in Berlin, on West Berlin protest through to left-wing terrorism, on state security in the GDR – be read anew or even for the first time today?

Both Messmer and Seemann are characterized by their innovative and confident handling of archive materials, narratives (in cooperation with Annett Gröschner, among others) and transfers to exhibitions and books.

Wenke Seemann: Utopie Auf Platte – Archivdialoge #1, Bierke-Verlag, Berlin, 2025
Arwed Messmer: Tiefenenttrümmerung – Der Traum vom Reich, Spector Books, Leipzig, 2023
Verena Hägler & Nicola Reiter: RAND – Im Übergang von Stadt und Land, Spector Books, Leipzig, 2022