Exhibition “Kreuzberg: Art and Migration since 1960” | Eternal arrival

Vlassis Caniaris, child, 1980 Photo: © Estate of Vlassis Caniaris, Photo: Sebastian Schaub In a field measuring five by six meters, various headless figures modeled on people with suitcases stand around a children's game "Heaven and Hell" drawn on the floor with chalk. The fields in the jumping game are labeled with terms such as “foreigner legislation,” “disorientation,” “foreigner police,” and the like. It symbolizes the hurdles and barriers that the workers, hired from various countries, especially from Turkey, were exposed to in the Federal Republic and in West Berlin in the 1960s.

The expansive sculpture is by the Greek artist Vlassis Caniaris (1928–2011) and can now be seen in the exhibition “Kreuzberg: Art and Migration since 1960” in Berlin’s Gropius Bau, designed by Gürsoy Doğtaş and Patrizia Dander. With his sculpture, defined as "Concrete Realism", Canaris dedicated himself to the lives of migrant workers in Berlin, who were then called "foreigners", "foreign workers" and "guest workers" with a male generic. The authorities actually thought that the migrants would eventually return to their respective countries without considering it possible that they would put down roots here.

The exhibition is expressly not dedicated to the hip bohemian and punk-oriented Kreuzberg, but rather sheds light on the migrant workers in Kreuzberg and their perspective on West Berlin conditions. “Around 130 works address the central experiences of so-called guest workers and subsequent generations (…) They tell of migration and exile, housing shortages, racism and exclusion, but also of resistance and self-empowerment, solidarity and community,” as the online introductory text states.

The exhibition is expressly not dedicated to the hip bohemian and punk-oriented Kreuzberg, but rather sheds light on the migrant workers.

Of course, the reasons for immigration were very different. Vlassis Caniaris had gone into exile from Greece because of the dictatorship and lived in West Berlin on a scholarship in the 1970s. Nevertheless, he understood the situation of the workers with open eyes and the shared fate of foreignness.

His faceless migrant figures point to the ignorance of German society and its authorities, in which people had no individual faces or personalities. They had been hired to work and quickly became the “foreigner problem” and were a nuisance. When “guest workers” campaigned for better working conditions and went on “rebellious” strikes, as was the case in Cologne at the Ford factory in 1973, suddenly different chords were struck. The Bild newspaper wrote: “Gastarbeiter, this word comes from guest. A guest who doesn’t behave like this should be thrown out the door!”

The video work “Aufstellung” (2005) by Harun Farocki (1944–2014) shows diagrams from newspapers showing how the stylized representations of people in pictograms convey “stereotypical, racist content” and are “put into relation to economic factors.” Today, human capital is talked about in a neoliberal and cynical way. The authorities of the German administration, especially the immigration police, often made life difficult for them. In Jannis Psychopedis (*1945 in Athens) impressive and hyper-realistic drawing, recruited workers with detailed faces and dressed in suits stand in line at an authority. Above them, the artist has inserted a drawing of a sculpture of Apollo, who, as an illusionary ideal image of the male body, is provocatively and contrastingly opposed to the individuals standing in line.

Hanefi (*1947) and Serpil (*1956) Yeter, both from Turkey, spent the 1970s in Kreuzberg and now live back in Turkey. There are numerous paintings from both that deal with the bitter reality of immigrants as well as their attempts to live their culture. In a painting by Hanefi Yeter from 1979, the residents of a house with crumbling plaster look out of the windows on Adalbertstrasse. On the ground floor you can see the typical fruit and vegetable shop with which many Turks built their livelihood. Posters in Turkish are stuck on the walls of the house and refer to the Turkish-speaking population's own political and cultural life.

The exhibition also presents works by artists from South Korea and Chile with their perspective on life in West Berlin. How current the topics of this historical exhibition are is often made clear. There was a lack of specific language courses and the education and science union called for more targeted language support for children as well as adults, to no avail.

Hyun-Sook Song (*1952) came from South Korea in 1972 as one of 11,000 nurses who were recruited by the Federal Republic of Germany between 1966 and 1977. From 1976 to 1982 she studied painting in Hamburg, where she still lives today. Her paintings in the exhibition show, among other things, nurses reading the long-awaited letters from home.

A similar motif with a woman holding a letter in her hands also characterizes a painting by the Chilean artist Cecilia Boisier (*1943). Her then husband and novelist Antonio Skármeta (1940–2024) was already in West Berlin for a project with the filmmaker Peter Lilienthal, while Boisier had fled to West Berlin via Argentina due to the US-backed coup by General Pinochet against Salvador Allende.

Gürsoy Doğtaş and Patrizia Dander also integrated into the exhibition works by left-wing German artists such as Evelyn Kuwertz (*1945), Monika Sieveking (*1944) and Sarah Haffner (1940–2018), who were influenced by the extra-parliamentary opposition and the student movement of 1967/68. With an internationalist orientation, they also paid attention to the migrant population, who were exposed to exploitation on the one hand and racist hostility on the other. Sarah Haffner created the bitterly angry painting with two park benches, one with the inscription “Only for Aryans” and the other with the scribble “Turks out”. A clear indication of how racism survived fascism and was directed against the Turkish population.

In a pleasant contrast to some other curators who think they are dealing with a topic for the first time, Gürsoy Doğtaş and Patrizia Dander expressly acknowledge the early efforts of institutions such as the Kunstamt Kreuzberg and the Berlin Festival. As early as 1975, the legendary exhibition “Mehmet Berlin’de. was held in cooperation between both institutions under the direction of Dieter Ruckhaberle and with the participation of Turkish people. Mehmet came from Anatolia” can be seen in Kreuzberg. In 1981, the photo exhibition with catalog followed under the direction of Krista Tebbe at the Kunstamt Kreuzberg: “Germany in the morning – Türkiye in the evening”.

Other media have corporations or billionaires behind them. We have the nd.Genossenschaft and readers like you. That makes us independent, and that's exactly how we want to remain. But it also means: without you the calculation won't work. We need 300,000 euros by the end of the year.

You can donate directly here, one-time or regularly, so that nd stays.