"What lies buried under the asphalt, is hidden behind the walls of houses, breaks forth with his blossoms and seeks space for the denied existence."
Six artists from Berlin, Munich, Karlsruhe and Stuttgart are excogiating different facets of the shards of broken dreams and they reveal images of various aspects of human failure.
The title of the exhibition "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" refers to the area Schöneweide and observes with the exhibited works past and present history and the human fate which goes along with it. Oberschöneweide was one of the largest connected industrial areas of Europe, a microcosm of the younger german history: The pioneering spirit at the beginning of the 20th century, armament production and massive use of forced laborers at the time of national socialism. After the war expropriation and dismantling, when the wall came down, one business after the other closed and the workers lived between hope and resignation. When it was in 2006 succeeds in locating the University of Economics and Technology, the area got a new impulse. The place of exhibition corresponds as a metaphor between shattered political visions and the fragments of an intimate existential injury.
The theme of unfulfilled children 's dreams can be found in the works of Susu Gorth’s work "Teddys" and Cornelia Kohler’s "Home is where I live inside". Gorth picks up on the subject in a way where the objects are refusing in an anarchic manner to accept their legal form, while the archetypes, like doll's houses and hairs in Kohler´s work are relayed with a new nightmarish meaning. The work of Kerstin Serz is also swaying between a romantic childlike reality and a profound, diffuse layer. Childhood serves as a mythical and utopian place in art as a field of ascertaining one's own social and cultural existence and shows itself in the works rather of a instability particular intensity. The painter Ivo Stilling dismantles the dream of speed. The status symbol automobile dissolves on the screen from perfect design to fragments of its function. The dream of Europe is in it´s political children shoes and fears of pending loss of national cultural identity. The series "Borders" by Martin Sigmund documents the fragile and constantly changing political constructs of our time. Ute Heim combines autobiographical and political memories in her video work a journey back to a place of her childhood.
S-Bahn Schöneweide, Trams 27, 60, 67 to station Firlstraße