some power, that hardly looked like power, said I’m only perfect in an empty room

Friedrich Kunath was born in Karl-Marx-Stadt, a town in former East Germany. His work for the ADN guardhouse, some power, that hardly looked like power, said I’m only perfect in an empty room (from the 1998 song “The Wild Kindness” by David Berman) symbolizes the collision between different times and cultures. With the ADN guardhouse from East Berlin as its exhibition venue, one might also speak about the collision between dream and nightmare. Friedrich Kunath lives and works in Los Angeles.

ADN GUARDHOUSE

After a twelve-month-long exhibition series in Berlin, the ADN Pförtnerhaus, a project initiated and curated by Berlin artist Christof Zwiener, is traveling to Los Angeles for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The guardhouse will be on view in various locations throughout Los Angeles County for an additional two months, curated by Zwiener in cooperation with the Wende Museum in Culver City. The ADN Pförtnerhaus project will conclude with the ceremonial transfer of the former East German guardhouse to the Wende Museum, where it will reside on permanent loan in the Wende’s sculpture garden.

From 1971 until its closing in 1992, the headquarters of the General German News Service (ADN) of East Germany in the Berlin-Mitte precinct (Mollstraße, on the corner of Karl-Liebknecht-Straße) was guarded by a gatekeeper who monitored the entrance to and exit from the parking lot. His base was a two-square-meter guardhouse, purposefully fashioned in a typically stark East German design. Mass-produced starting in the 1970s, these aluminum shacks were positioned in front of or behind every government agency and ministry in East Berlin, in order to monitor people with or without vehicles. At the same time, these standard control stations were used for mass surveillance of public spaces in East Berlin as well as for monitoring border crossings.

When the former ADN building was sold to an investor in 2012, the guardhouse was slated for destruction. With the acquisition of the guardhouse and the beginning of the Pförtnerhaus project in June 2013, the artist Christof Zwiener saved the only remaining GDR monitoring station in the public space of East Berlin from destruction and eventual disappearance. On the former grounds of the motor pool of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) in Lichtenberg on Herzbergstraße, the guardhouse found a new home in September 2013. There the guardhouse was made available as a temporary exhibition space for ten invited artists who engaged with themes including the legacy of the GDR, state surveillance in general, public space in Berlin, and its constant transformation.

The exhibition series in Los Angeles will further this discourse. International artists including Bernd Trasberger, Sonya Schönberger, and Friedrich Kunath will grapple with the consequences of social and political changes, working together with Christof Zwiener. Finally, in the new sculpture park of the Wende Museum on the former grounds of a National Guard Armory in Culver City, the ADN Pförtnerhaus will take its place as an independent installation.

The ADN Pförtnerhaus is a project of the artist Christof Zwiener, with the generous support of the Wende Museum, the Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany, Villa Aurora, El Segundo Museum of Art (ESMoA), and the cities of Los Angeles, El Segundo, and Culver City.

Presented by ADN Pförtnerhaus in collaboration with the Wende Museum. Further information about the ADN Pförtnerhaus can be found at www.adn-pfoertnerhaus.de.