Soon
after the fall of the Berlin Wall
known and unknown artists started
to paint on the eastern side of
it. It soon became known as the
Easter Gallery. I was teaching epidemiology
in Berlin in 1989 and 1990 and on
a sunny Sunday morning of September
2000, I believe, I went there too
with a friend and his daughter.
I took pictures of the paintings
that appealed to me the most. The
range was impressive. Several paintings
were political statements against
the previous regime or against pollution,
or against the dangers of nuclear
power. Others were more directly
accessible: comments on the different
walls that limit our lives or more
classic artistic expression. Humor
was also present: on God, on the
west/best. There was plenty of food
for thoughts.
Later,
I made a selection of pictures for
a scrapbook and inserted related
texts on “walls” from
the literature: Eluard, Tagore,
the Bible, etc. Friends have suggested
it should be published as a book.
One day perhaps…
In
April 2001 I had a photo exhibition
of 35 of these pictures at the Goethe
Institute in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
To stay as close as possible to
the visual impression of commercial
paints on a concrete wall Moumina
Dorgabekova and I decided to print
the scanned (digitized) slides on
a commercial photo printer. The
A3 format results were amazingly
good. The challenge of the exhibition
was not the pictures but the captions.
How do you explain to a young Bangladeshi
born in 1980 what “Buerlinica”
means? Guernica, the Spanish Civil
War, Picasso, Buerlinger –
a leader of the Italian Communist
Party, etc. Or that this painting
is a representation of 3 Miles Island,
etc. It took many hours to prepare
short but intelligible explanations.
But were explanations even necessary?
