In Between Images

The exhibition IN BETWEEN IMAGES by Nina Torp ties the architectural history of Karl-Marx-Allee to her on-going interest in investigating rituals of visual perception and heritage.

Researching, analysing and interpreting historical material, she examines how the Western hegemonic gaze creates and communicates culture and memory. The starting point for her projects is often a cultural artefact, an art-historical subject or a cultural phenomenon. She discusses the notion of a linear, uniform and regularly flowing time – a key issue in her work is how the past extends into the present, and how it is communicated and used through the discipline of history.

She finds an interest in how art history in its chronological form seems like a logical explanation of the past. Upon closer examination however, it turns out that history too is largely based on coincidences, dreams and delusions of grandeur.

An important historical reference point for several recent projects is the excavation of Pompeii after 1740 – an event that manifested in certain cultural phenomena and influenced historiography and visual representations until today.

For her current exhibition at Galerie im Turm, Nina Torp explores how these concepts reflect even in the built environment of the gallery itself, the historical urban complex of the Karl-Marx-Allee and Frankfurter Tor. Dating from the 1950s, the former Stalinallee displays the architectural ambitions as well as the Soviet influence that shaped the post-war rebuilding of East-German cities. Its facades incorporate elements of antiquity and Renaissance architecture, and the socialist boulevard appears as a pastiche of architectural history, a past flowing by as one walks down the spacious sidewalks from Frankfurter Tor to Strausberger Platz.