Birte Endrejat
AKTIVITÄTSZONEN
10.09. – 22.10.2017

“There is something different about Birte Endrejat. Does this have to do with the fact that she does not produce ‘closed’ works of art, but rather creates a network of references and mutual observations according to the motto ‘watching someone watching’? And then feeds these observations back to those being observed?

It is a lot about seeing and showing. Seeing in the sense of: looking closely and examining how perception changes. Showing in the sense of: how do I direct the gaze, how do I provide information, what power relationships are involved in this gesture of making visible or invisible?

Birte Endrejat works site-specifically, which means she is on site and looks around and listens and writes. The starting point for Endrejat’s approaches are questions such as: what do places do to people? To what extent are the behaviors of residents and visitors related to the specifications and stories of buildings? How do they structure their actions? How does it feel to be in front of a To be able to stand in an empty space and develop new visions instead of having to find small-scale (compromise) solutions?

In order to find the right format for her type of observations and engagement with places, Birte Endrejat develops different formats depending on the context and situation and works with publications, maps or spatial installations. What their forms of expression have in common is that they undermine the expectations that artists are confronted with and in return activate the relationship between viewer and work of art.”

(Dr. Anna-Lena Wenzel)

With the exhibition ACTIVITY ZONES, Birte Endrejat focuses on the Columbus Center in Bremerhaven. The artist examines the building as a carrier of visions of a reorientation of urban planning in the 1970s and as a used, functional building in 2017. To do this, she brings together material from the time the building was built and the present. Among other things, she asked all residents of the residential towers to provide photos of their views for the exhibition. The starting point for this was a desire to correct her own perception: the artist feels that the building complex, which was planned as a connection to the water, is a dividing line every time she visits the city. In her view, the desired connection remains reserved for the residents through their view.

Beyond the photos, the artist also takes up the structure of the building. A floor drawing in the hall goes back to a never-realized competition entry in the 1971 ideas competition for the site between the Columbus Center and the Weser. This is overlaid with current observations on the site in its current form using a folding map. The marking on the floor is worn away by the exhibition visitors, is distributed and accumulates new information.

In this exhibition, Endrejat negotiates fundamental questions of her artistic work, about the dramaturgy of architecture: If a designed environment already anticipates the action that takes place in it, do users of this environment then act like extras in a precisely designed backdrop? And: whose ideas are they carrying out?

Thanks to the Bremerhaven City Archives for the loans shown in the exhibition and for supporting the artist in her research.

We would like to thank the following people for submitting photos from the Columbus Center: Bernd Abele, Eckhard Aits, Appartement Aussichtsreich, W. Böhm, Rainer Brachmann, Brigitte, Rosemarie Brikmanis-Brückner, Christa & Manfred Dubbels, Christine Frai, Claudine Garloff, Klaus Graap, Jürgen Jäckel, Richard Kuhlmann, Edeltraud Quapil, Hermann Renken, J.S., Karl-Heinz Stegmann, Hans-Jürgen Thomas, Andrea & Heiko Tietje, Gisela Tresch, Ronald Weiß and the unnamed senders who requested that they remain anonymous.

Curated by Thomas Trümper.