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

The exhibition RAND – At the transition from urban to rural by Verena Hägler & Nicola Reiter can be seen every Thursday and Saturday from 3 to 7 p.m. until May 3. Admission is free.

The event is taking place as part of EMOP Berlin – European Month of Photography.