After Obama‘s electrifying speech at the Siegessäule this past Thursday, it seems appropriate to mention the fifteenth installment of Rohkunstbau, a trilogy entitled THREE COLORS- BLUE WHITE RED, the final chapter of which (RED) opened two weeks ago at its new location at Villa Kellermann on the Heiliger Lake in Potsdam, which the press release describes as possessing “a layered and ambiguous aristocratic, bourgeois and proletarian history.”
The exhibition coincides with the sixtieth anniversary of the United Nations General Assembly’s Declaration of Human Rights, which states, “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” The participating artists, Marc Bauer, Guy Ben-Ner, Richard Hamilton, Britta Jones, Alexandra Khlestkina, Jonathan Monk, Jose Noguero, Bettina Pousttchi, Cornelia Renz and Brigitte Waldach, were asked to create work that addressed their understanding of “brotherhood” in the politically-charged, geographically fragmented and fundamentally combative climate of our contemporary times.
From the press release, “At no time in recent history has the idea of an international brotherhood of man been under greater threat. The United Nations, the promulgator of ‘endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood,’ appears today to be a deeply troubled organisation. Within Europe a sense of a shared human endeavour seems equally problematic and put into doubt and question. Contemporary artists engaging with the subject matter becomes as a result a prescient means to discuss and open up issues related to what was once taken as a given, namely the brotherhood of life declared as the meaningful manifestation of our shared human existence.”
THREE COLORS- RED is on view until October 5th. For more information on the exhibition, click here. Schoenes Wochenende.
