Bettina Pousttchi
First of all, it is probably worth getting one’s prepositions right. Bettina Pousttchi showed her new work at the Schirn Kunsthalle, but not so much in it; more precisely, her exhibition took place primarily on it: With her new installation, Framework, 2012, she gave the Schirn a new facade. In doing so, she was following up on a work from 2009, Echo, which was installed on the exterior of the Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin for six months. That piece was inspired by the exterior of the recently demolished Palast der Republik, which had been the seat of the East German parliament as well as a cultural and leisure center. With the disappearance of the state of which it had once been a focal point, this remarkable modernist behemoth became a victim of the will to cover the traces of a rejected past; the plan is to use the site for a reconstruction of the building the Palast succeeded, the Hohenzollern royal palace, which was built in the eighteenth century and extensively damaged during World War II. Using archival photographic images and digital manipulation, Pousttchi created a new, fictional facade, printed it on billboard paper, and placed it over the existing one of the Temporäre Kunsthalle. This ghostly skin evoked the vanished Palast der Republik without exactly representing it: a sort of uncanny apparition, at once familiar and unfamiliar.
Framework was produced similarly, but to subtler, more ambiguous effect. In this case, the artist began by taking photographs of two nearby buildings made with timber-frame architecture (in German, Fachwerk, “framework”)—one an authentic seventeenth-century building, the other a 1980s reconstruction of a building that had, like the royal palace, been a casualty of the war. Out of these she wove a beautifully rhythmic photographic frieze covering some four hundred feet of the Schirn’s eastern facade and rotunda. As a postmodern creation—that is, one designed with an eye to historicism—the building accepted this intervention easily. Rather than covering the structure up, as she’d done in Berlin, Pousttchi slotted her work into the existing architecture, where it subsisted as a marvelous decoration, at once ornamental (in its intricate patterning) and austere (in its limitation to black-and-white). One could almost wish it had become a permanent feature. At the same time, the work quietly yet persistently asked questions about memory, whether collective or personal, aesthetic or political. Memory is always a sort of reconstruction, after all—so does it ultimately connect us to our past or detach us from it? Pousttchi, by printing her images crossed with fine, blurry horizontal lines that inevitably evoke something seen on a malfunctioning TV set, implies that the “noise” of representational systems is always liable to become a blind that interposes itself between us and what we are trying to see, but she never suggests that the past is absolutely lost to sight.
Also on view—in rather than on the building—were photographs from Pousttchi’s ongoing “World Time Clock” series, 2008–: close-up views of the faces of clocks in public places around the world, always showing the same time, 1:55. Here, displaying far-flung locations at a nominally identical moment, she might be contesting the seeming site-specificity of Framework and Echo. But those works themselves remind us that the apparent specificity of any site is in part the effect of a reconstructed image whose accuracy remains to be verified.