Andreas Siekmann

Serving as the most recent installment of his ongoing project Pawns, Trustees, and the Invisible Hand, 2004–, Andreas Siekmann’s exhibition “Verhandlungen unter Zeitdruck” (Negotiations Under Time Pressure) focuses on the economic restructuring of East Germany following reunification. This redevelopment was conducted through the Treuhandanstalt (Trust Agency), a kind of state-owned holding company that, aided by several consulting firms, privatized former GDR property after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. During this transformation from a national to an international economy, the Treuhandanstalt basically liquidated some fourteen thousand East German companies and thereby cut countless jobs, all in the name of neoliberalism. Siekmann illustrates the complex political and economic interconnections of this process through a language of statistics and pictograms influenced by the formal style of the Cologne Progressives from the 1920s. Hanging on the wall in a side room, twenty red, graphic works on paper constitute a timeline—or, as the artist puts it, a “score”—that brings together information about different events, industries, and socioeconomic classes, while the main gallery features a dense room-size installation titled Treuhand-Space, 2008. In the center of this work is a table on which, in the style of a theatrum mundi, miniature renderings of workers and bureaucrats circle in cars on a conveyor belt against a backdrop of Berlin buildings that house offices of major global consulting companies like McKinsey & Company, which in the ’90s profited by providing companies with “overhead value analysis” of their staffing costs. The Treuhandanstalt itself (which, by its dissolution in 1994, had incurred debts estimated at around two hundred billion deutsche marks) had been located on Wilhelmstrasse in the former Reich Air Ministry building, which today is the Ministry of Finance. A mirror installed on a building opposite from, and visible through the windows of, the gallery reflects the old Treuhandanstalt facade.