Marc Marquardt adopted a radical aesthetic in his series Lot (2007/2008), which confronts viewer with stark images of black and white chambers, bordered by bare concrete, and illuminated only by the cold light of the camera flash. The chambers are rooms in the vacant high-rise apartment block of the artist’s childhood and the pictures were taken shortly before the building’s demolition. Marquardt spent several days scraping the wallpaper from the walls and ripping out carpets. The result of this performative approach is a hauntingly barren atmosphere. The images convey a sense of claustrophobia that can also be read as a metaphor for the confinement of the subject within a walled state. Marquardt’s perspective in this series is a psychological one and the abandoned apartments speak of the identities that dissolved with the demise of the GDR. In Datschen (2015) – exhibited here for the first time – the artist documents the architectural legacy of the GDR in a factual style reminiscent of Bernd and Hilla Becher. The bungalows depicted in these photographs – referred to in the GDR as ‘dachas’ – were an important part of East German leisure culture and many have since become listed buildings. Several million of these buildings were arranged in settlements which, together with their gardens, provided a place of respite from the cramped conditions of the GDR’s prefab high-rise apartment blocks. Marquardt’s work in this series engages with a theme that looms large in contemporary photography: architecture as objects of remembrance and vestiges of defunct ideologies and ways of life. The uniform presentation of Marquardt’s images of the dachas, all of which have been modified by their owners, foregrounds the tension between uniformity and individuality that characterized the socialist society.

Image 1 and 3: „Datschen“, 2014 / Image 2: „Lot“, 2008

Film // directed by Dörte Grimm * camera, cut: Nadja Smith * sounddesign: Frieder Nagel * production: Nadja Smith