Exhibition from October 16, 2023 – February 11, 2024 (first floor)
Vernissage on October 15, 2023 from 6 to 9 p.m.

Works by Eileen Farida Almarales Noy, Thomas Bratzke, Felipe Dulzaides, Lisa Schmidt-Colinet, Alexander Schmoeger, Marlies Pahlenberg, Hans Hs Winkler, Andrea Zaumseil, Florian Zeyfang

In the context of the extreme political upheavals of the 20th and 21st centuries, the exhibition tells stories of people from both cities at different times. Stories that are hardly known or not known at all. It is about big politics, about real life and survival, about incredible biographies between fiction and reality. The artists in the exhibition live in Berlin and Havana; their biographies are often anchored in both cities.

They have all experienced the consequences of political decisions in the most diverse forms. The works shown go far beyond the reflection of individual realities; fiction mixes with documentary and interweaves to create an artistic view of the little-known history and present of two special cities and their people.

With her performative short films, the Marlies Pahlenberg invites us to ask the question "What if...?". By combining documentary and staged elements, the real and the imagined become blurred.
In the video installation ACCIDENTE, taxi drivers in Havana play the role of the father of the artist's still unborn child. In the interior spaces of the taxis, where strangers share a piece of the road with each other every day, the artist initiates a role play with the drivers to question society's image of an expectant mother, of relationships, the role of the father and the nuclear family. Intimacy and anonymity move closer together in a very confined space.

The Berlin artist Thomas Bratzke deals with his East German-Cuban childhood in his installation "Mit uns zieht die fremde Zeit / With us moves the foreign time".
Using the media of video, object, drawing and photography, the work tells of the decades-long separation and the touching story of the reunification of his German-Cuban family. Bratzke describes the powerlessness of the parents in the tension between the state authorities of Cuba and the GDR, the perspectives of the child and the present-day artist respectively.

The Cuban artist Eileen F. Almarales Noy has been living in Germany for a short time. Several of her works can be seen in the exhibition. In the photographically documented performance MIKRO D VITAMIN, she shows the extreme discrepancy between the tourists' transfigured image of Cuba and the current reality of life for Cubans. Tourists have privileges that the Cubans themselves cannot or even are not allowed to enjoy. The artist herself travelled to the popular tourist region of Varadero this year and was a welcome guest because of her foreign currency. She was able to enjoy privileges that were denied to her as a person living in Cuba. In her installations, too, she addresses the extreme living conditions in Cuba and contrasts them with her current life in Germany.

For years, Lisa Schmidt-Colinet, Alexander Schmoeger and Florian Zeyfang have regularly visited Casa Lamas, a private residence in Havana designed by the architect Humberto Alonso. The house was built on the threshold between the time of the Batista regime and the revolution of 1959. For the artists, the Lamas House becomes the starting point for different narratives that reflect the history, the environment, but also personal experience with the architecture and the people of Cuba. The installation "The Empty House" interprets the distinctive cubic elements from which Casa Lamas was designed. Pinhole camera photographs from various visits, together with the elements, map a space that allows the "Empty House" and its possible stories to emerge.

Andrea Zaumseil shows large-scale drawings of the sea, created a few years ago on the Malecon, the iconic waterfront in Havana. Back then, in 2015, Cuba was on the move, a transformation of Cuban society seemed tangible. Today, in 2023, Andrea Zaumseil looks back on that time with wistfulness. Today, under increasingly precarious living conditions, "departure" no longer means a reason to stay as it did back then, but to set out for a life that beckons beyond the sea. Far away.

Since 2004, Cuban artist Felipe Dulzaides has been working on the visionary architectural forms of the unfinished art school ISA in Havana. Built on a former golf course from the time of the Batista dictatorship, the ISA was to become the best art school in the country and reflect the visions of the new era and the revolution in its architecture.
Felipe Dulzaide's video "Water Runs" offers a glimpse into the breathtaking and now slowly decaying architecture. With the intervention "Water Runs", Dulzaides cleaned their now withered waterways, which were originally meant to criss-cross the grounds like life-giving veins.

"Brecht is in Havana" is a video work by Felipe Dulzaides and Hans Hs Winkler in cooperation with the Cuban actor Doimeadios Osvaldo and the boxer Radames Castillo.
Plays by Bertolt Brecht have been performed regularly in Havana since the 1960s with great success. In no other country did his plays reflect the problems at hand as much as in Cuba. Dulzaides and Winkler undertook a journey through Havana in May 2022 together with "Bertolt Brecht" to explore realities of life in Havana today.

"Café Minorista" by Hans Hs Winkler is an intervention and installation of historical posters. As a tribute to the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Grupo Minorista in March 1923, it was presented at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana in 2023. The installation refers to the relationship between the Grupo Minorista in Havana and DADA Berlin. It illustrates the intersections and cultural connections since the 1920s. Both the Dadaists and the Minorists distanced themselves in their manifestos and aims from traditional art movements and bourgeois values after these, accompanied by monarchies or dictators, ended in the horrors of the First World War. From their avant-garde attitude, they developed new forms of expression: Collages, ready-mades, interventions, actions or sound poems, which had a lasting impact on art, and Fluxus, which influenced the Happenings of the 1960s and the conceptual art of our days.

Exhibition concept: Hans Hs Winkler, Thomas Bratzke, Karin Scheel
Curator: Karin Scheel