nach 1990

Project presentation and artist talk with Christof Zwiener

The former building of the embassy of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in Austria is located at Frimbergergasse 6-8 in Vienna's Hietzing district. For the exhibition vanishing structures. Politics of Disappearance, Christof Zwiener has dismantled the flagpole in front of the building and transferred it to the exhibition. On the one hand, this intervention leaves a blank space in Vienna's cityscape and is simultaneously an intervention in the former territory of the GDR, raising questions about representation, statehood and dominance.

Christof Zwiener has spent several years with an extensive artistic research, searching East Berlin's public spaces in detail for traces of the GDR. In the process, he documented flagpoles that, like relics of another time, refer to the existence of a state that no longer exists today. He compiled this research in the publication nach 1990- Fokus Fahnenmast, which was published by Vexer-Verlag in 2019.

As part of the event, Christof Zwiener will present his research and also show material that he found in the archive of the Federal Foreign Office in Berlin. Using the building at Frimbergergasse 6-8 as an example, he will not only explain his artistic research process, but also examine the history of the building and, in connection with this, the history of the GDR and how this continues to shape coexistence and the culture of remembrance today, far beyond the German-German history.

Christof Zwiener (1972/DE) takes a critical look at historiography and its gaps. He works with performative and photographic means as well as installations and site-specific interventions.


The exhibition vanishing structures. Politics of Disappearance examines the questions and social, political, and ecological conditions tied to the disappearance of architecture, landscapes, people, and traditions. Gradual processes, such as transformations in urban space, play a central role, but also the temporality of global flows of commodities or fictitious future scenarios that postulated that present-day civilisations no longer exist. Within all these processes of change, we focus on things lost and absent, which are often only noticed by the few or not at all. The participating artists from different geographic and cultural backgrounds take individual artistic approaches to the politics of disappearance, enabling a translocal view on the topic.

Artists: Ana Alenso, Anca Benera & Arnold Estefan, Chan Sook Choi, Karolina Freino, Shirin Mohammad, Silvia Noronha, Maha Yammine and Christof Zwiener

Curator: Vincent Schier

KEX - Kunsthalle Exnergasse is a cooperation partner of the Klima Biennale Wien

Supported by the Korean Cultural Center