Secret Rooms

15 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Daniel & Geo Fuchs have travelled East Germany to trace down the visual remains of the STASI: interrogation rooms and floors with a Kafkaesque atmosphere, the cold design of terror, with flowered wallpapers and upholstered doors.

Secret Rooms
15 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall Daniel & Geo Fuchs have travelled East Germany to trace down the visual remains of the STASI. They discovered former rooms of the Ministry for State Security – places still intact, preserved as memorials of injustice, some appearing as time stood still. 
Secret Rooms
Top: Wandlitz, summerhouse of Erich Honecker, 2005. C-Print, Alu-Dibond, 88 x 70,5 cm. Above: STASI prison Bautzen, recreation yard, 2004. C-Print, Alu-Dibond, 88 x 70,5 cm
Daniel & Geo Fuchs photographed the prisons in Bautzen, Potsdam and Hohenschönhausen, the office of Erich Mielke, the STASI bunker in Leipzig and other buildings. They show us interrogation rooms and floors with a Kafkaesque atmosphere, the cold design of terror, with flowered wallpapers and upholstered doors. 16 million people lived in the GDR and 90.000 of them officially and 180.000 unofficially worked for the STASI.
Secret Rooms
STASI prison Bautzen, staircase, 2004. C-Print, Acryl, Alu-Dibond, 170 x 135 cm
Images of “STASI secret rooms” were shown in many renowned institutions like the Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam, the Munich Museum Villa Stuck and in the Fotografins Hus Stockholm, supported by the Goethe Institut. In 2007 almost 30.000 visitors have seen the Secret Rooms in the Museo de Bellas Artes at the Palau de la Virreina in Barcelona. In Stuttgart the Galerie Molline is showing extracts from the famous series Toygiants of Daniel & Geo Fuchs at the Galerienhaus Stuttgart simultaneously. Furthermore the exhibition is an official collateral event of the “Fotosommer Stuttgart”. So hopefully many guests from abroad will find the way to Stuttgart.
Secret Rooms
STASI bunker Machern, camouflage building, 2005. C-Print, Alu-Dibond, 88 x 70,5 cm

“Schacher – Raum für Kunst” is a gallery promoting new and contemporary art as a dialogical, multi-disciplined spatial experience. The exhibitions focus on the collective dialogical presentation of new painterly, sculptural and photographic approaches that seek and find the dialogue with the space, the visitor and one another. The exhibition “Secret Rooms” is combining the large-sized images of Daniel & Geo Fuchs with stone sculptures of Uli Gsell. The result is an appealing space installation evoking a strange feeling between anxiety and enchantment. Marko Schacher

 

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