Exhibition from April 28, to July 20, 2025
Opening: Sunday, April 27, 2025, 6:00 pm

With: Tina Bara, Sibylle Bergemann, Barbara Berthold, Yvon Chabrowski, Regina Fleck, Ellen Fuhr, Sabina Grzimek, Monika Hamann, Angela Hampel, Doris Kahane, Petra Kasten, Susanne Kutter, Ingeborg Lockemann, Barbara Lüdde, Emerita Pansowowa, Helga Paris, Nuria Quevedo, Evelyn Richter, Jana Richter, Ute Richter, Ricarda Roggan, Elske Rosenfeld, Karin Sakrowski, Christine Schlegel, Luise Schröder, Gundula Schulze, Maria Sewcz, Ulrike Theusner, Christine Wahl, Ulla Walter, Ute Weiss-Leder, Steffie Wendt, Karin Wieckhorst, Gabriele Worgitzki, Miro Zahra, Tanja Zimmermann

Curated by Andrea Pichl

The group exhibition Worin unsere Stärke besteht - to be continued ties in with current national and international discourses on the GDR.

Andrea Pichl combines eleven contemporary positions by female artists from different generations who were born in the GDR before the fall of the Wall with works by female artists from the Beeskow collection of art from the GDR. The works are characterised by a plurality of themes, media, approaches and experiences. The central theme of art in the GDR was the human figure - positively connoted and desired by the state. Andrea Pichl has selected works from the Museum Utopie und Alltag Beeskow that subtly oppose the ‘comprehensive harmonisation of everyday life and history and of the individual and class as a pacification strategy’ (Hiltrud Ebert) that was common in the GDR.

The exhibition is dedicated to the significance of biographies - not a narrative of the GDR or a historicisation of art from the GDR. Basically, it matters who comes from where. Artistic practices develop influenced by experiences and encounters. How does the course of biographies shape approaches to certain themes and which themes recur in different generations? Many of the artists represented in the exhibition work with the traces of their past that extend into the present by means of artistically organised archives.

The project is a continuation of the exhibition Worin unsere Stärke besteht. 50 Women Artists from the GDR, which Andrea Pichl curated at Kunstraum Kreuzberg in 2022. Structural mechanisms of exclusion in cultural and art institutions are still in place: Women are still underrepresented in art and culture. The works of female artists with a GDR background still rarely appear in contemporary exhibitions.

The exhibition is a co-operation project between Schloss Biesdorf and the Museum Utopie und Alltag Beeskow. The two institutions have been working together for many years with the aim of contextualising contemporary art from the GDR. Since 2021, the Museum Utopie und Alltag has united the collection of everyday culture of the GDR in Eisenhüttenstadt and the collection of art from the GDR in Beeskow. It houses 17,000 works of fine art and 1,500 objects of applied art and amateur art that were owned by the mass organisations of the GDR, such as the FDGB or the FDJ, before 1990. This art is part of the cultural memory and makes it clear that the state commissioning policy had many actors who did not always make decisions according to standardised guidelines. There are 380 women among the total of 1,700 artists.

An exhibition project by Schloss Biesdorf in cooperation with the Museum Utopie und Alltag, Beeskow.