Participating artists:Klara Marlene Fischer, Li Huhn, Dayoung Jung, Laila Kamil, Brigita Kasperaitė, Arno Selle, Ria Schöneberger, David Schröder, Svetlana Shilankova, Ona Barbora Šlapšinskaitė, Liu Tianxu, Vincent Wolff
opening hours:Fr.-Sat. 4pm-open end, Sun. 2pm-4pm
Venue:Internationales Kunstzentrum Petersberg / IKZP
Hoppberg
06193 Petersberg
Koordinaten: 51.62934815320158, 12.00441258031337
Living under the Rock is a site-specific exhibition and artistic intervention in the former, now privatized Stasi bunker in Petersberg near Halle. The bunker is an exemplary model of fifteen district bunkers that were built by the GDR State Security as system architecture in the early 1970s. During the Cold War, the command bunkers were intended to enable a district division of the State Security to live and operate self-sufficiently underground for around eight days in the event of a war or nuclear attack. All bunkers were well camouflaged and hidden away from large cities in agricultural areas.
The bunker in Petersberg is located on the edge of a village with allotment gardens in a forest and meadow environment. Like a bubble, the difference between inside and outside could hardly be greater. During the standby period, the bunker was camouflaged underground by a market garden above ground. It was built, maintained and kept ready for emergencies that never happened - nothing more. After the fall of the Wall in the 1990s, it was discovered, looted and sprayed with graffiti. Now an art center is being built there.
The saying living under a rock suggests the meaning of 'a life in isolation’. The former Stasi Bunker, located five meters underground, built to function in the times of crisis, became dysfunctional from the beginning. Location camouflaged with daily routines, a place that shouldn’t been found, and so it was an isolated object from the knowledge about itself.
Today, we find a place that has been overwritten many times over. An architecture with a lost function, a place of retreat that will probably remain forever due to its massive concrete materiality, and at the same time is difficult to reappropriate due to its atmospheric and spatial quality - a negative space as an immersive installation, placed horizontally underground, and nature sprawling above the earth.
The artists' works approach this complex place in an intuitive, poetic and physical way. Diverse superimpositions of historical, material and sensory traces under and above the earth come together here in their diversity to form something whole, perhaps a third landscape that is difficult to define but can be experienced intensely somatically. The artistic contributions reinforce this place, to which further layers are now added for a short time, reinforcing the impression of alienation, and at the same time questioning the futures and suggesting new contexts for the location.
