Die Alte Mauer

Intervention, Art in Architecture

Berlin, DE
2023

This site-specific installation consists of a temporary wall that was left over from the architecture of the previous exhibition. The wall blocked the light that came in through the two windows at the end of the hall. The artist divided the old wall into two new walls that now meet at a ninety-degree angle.

There are markings on the floor that run under this new structure, revealing the position of the original wall. The artist chose to keep these traces. This mirrors the remaining traces of the Berlin Wall, which divided the city from 1961 until 1989 and used to run partially along the canal on the Eastern side of Hamburger Bahnhof.

Yet despite perennial anxiety of social and economic decline, one grows accustomed to the imbalanced distribution of wealth. The environmental effects of capitalism commodifying all aspects of human activity are well established, and yet there is still no seismic shift in socio-political understanding in sight. Kaabi-Linke’s installation ↗ thus becomes a metaphor for this kind of collective indifference to any necessity of change.

3-Dimensional

Media
Site-specific intervention

Dimension
407,5 × 60 cm, 420 × 60 cm, 407,5 × 60 cm

Exhibition
Seeing Without Light, Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie, Berlin

 

Exhibition view of the work 'DIe Alte Mauer' from artist Nadia Kaabi-Linke, 2023, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin

Artwork in the back
Salt & Sand, 2016

Courtesy
Francois Schneider Collection

Artwork in the front
“These Goddamn Boys All Stealing,” 2008

©Photo: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Nationalgalerie / Jacopo La Forgia, 2023