initiative urbane kulturen / KREISE ZIEHEN 2 GOING OUT OF CIRCLES 2

The visual arts and artistically informed urban research are increasingly converging in the field of ›urban cultures‹. Art and culture as well as urbanity and built space need to be explored, experienced and narrated.

One field of engagement in recent years has been large housing estates built in the heroic phase between 1960 and 1990. They possess dimensions that are alone comparable to a small town – yet crucial urban functions such as the arts and cultural life are foremost projected onto the city centre. For this reason, large housing estates remain oddly foreign to many people in the city.

New narratives and images are needed to break open the seeming homogeneity of housing estates and to fathom their fascinating contradictoriness.
Housing estates are comparable to one another – even across continents. They are often organized in concentric circles around the core city. But even within one city, contact between housing estates is rare.

The exhibition project GOING OUT OF CIRCLES in the district of Hellersdorf builds bridges within Berlin as well as further afield to partner housing estates and partner cities. It asks how stereotypes of a place are formed, how they are attributed from the outside and how they are accepted and continued internally? And how in the periphery, visual strategies exist which do not impose an ›image‹ from the outside but are developed through the self-will of the residents themselves? With its strategies of pictorial narration and visual knowledge, art can carry special significance for these questions. Art is increasingly going out of its comfort zone with extended formats of research and production as it seeks to engage new circles in urban society.

KREISE ZIEHEN [GOING OUT OF CIRCLES] - Part 2

Stadtteilforum IDEE 01239 (DE, Dresden-Prohlis)
with Ulf Aminde, Torsten Birne, Margit Czenki, Thilo Fröbel, Andreas M. Fohr, Eva Hertzsch und Adam Page, Matthew Houlding, Felix Liebig

In the second part of the exhibition series, artworks produced at the artist and resident-run space IDEE 01239 on the Prohlis estate in Dresden and the sociologist Renaud Epstein’s collection of images of French peripheral housing estates will be presented.

Renaud Epstein owns a comprehensive archive of historical picture postcards of peripheral housing estates in France often termed »Banlieues«. For years he has been posting a card a day from his ever-expanding collection on his Twitter account @renaud_epstein. »At a time when this housing is being physically eradicated from urban space, circulating these images in social media is about forming collective memory and adding a historical perspective to the ever-recurring debate about housing estates which are too often incorrectly termed as ›Ghettos‹.« (R. Epstein)
A part of Epstein’s collection will be exhibited for the first time outside the internet. Its presentation in the station urbaner kulturen gives cause to think about Hellersdorf in an international context.

In 2006 residents on the Prohlis estate on the outskirts of Dresden founded the IDEE 01239 association in an empty drinks store with the artists Eva Hertzsch and Adam Page. Calling itself a »Neighbourhood Forum« the association produced exhibitions, discussion panels, interventions in public space and workshops. Artists and residents thereby created their own conditions of production and a model for shared work as an alternative to the regulations of Germany’s job scheme programm »Agenda 2010«. Their common motivation was to examine their own social and economical precariousness and to establish new cultural space outside a city centre dominated by city marketing and commercialisation.
Reviewing IDEE 01239, its artistic output and its preoccupation with the production of images from the periphery opens up a space to reflect on the role of art in society and on the role of nGbK in Hellersdorf.