Through a glass wall in Forum Hamburger Bahnhof, abandoned train tracks can be seen outside. They remind us that the museum was once a train station. The railway network was used by the Nazi regime to conduct mass deportations during the Second World War (1939-1945). In response, Nadia Kaabi-Linke transformed two benches commonly found on train platforms into unusable objects resembling instruments of torture.
The title of this ephemeral project, Platform 69, refers to a train platform at the neighbouring Moabit freight station, which is now defunct. Today, it is a memorial site commemorating the more than 30,000 people who were rounded up on platforms 69, 81, and 82 and sent away to various ghettos and extermination camps. This work consists of one bench placed inside Nadia Kaabi-Linke’s exhibition Seeing Without Light in Hall 3, and a second bench in the inaccessible garden behind Forum Hamburger Bahnhof.
While the two benches are variations of the Protected Area series, their placement inside and outside the Seeing Without Light exhibition at Hamburger Bahnhof was a deliberate choice to draw attention to the venue’s historical and geographical environment. The historical site of the museum used to be directly connected to the platform in the centre of Berlin, where it was impossible to oversee the deportation of thousands of Berlin citizens. The exhibition’s title, “Seeing without light,” refers to events, places, and traces that persist even when one deliberately tries to overlook them.
