Exhibition: Reise(un)freiheit – Werke von Annemirl Bauer

Reise(un)freiheit – Werke von Annemirl Bauer
Kabinett der Galerie der Kustodie im Görges-Bau
May 30 to September 20, 2024

Exhibition opening: May 30, 2024, 19:00
Galerie der Kustodie der TU Dresden im Görges-Bau (Helmholtzstraße 9
01069 Dresden)

"What do walls and distances matter to the mind!" wrote the artist Annemirl Bauer (1939-1989) in a letter from the GDR to her aunt in West Germany in the mid-1980s. She considered traveling to be essential in order to gather impressions of life in other countries, to sharpen her political world view and to develop her artistic work in an informed manner. Since the 1950s, her travels have taken her to France, Bulgaria, Spain and the former Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic, Slovakia and part of Ukraine), among other places.

She traveled whenever she could and fought for this right. Annemirl Bauer countered the SED's restrictive border policy, which she described as the "violent confinement of an entire people", with public protest. In a so-called petition in 1984, she demanded general freedom of travel for all GDR citizens, whereupon she was sanctioned with a professional ban and repression by the state security. The restrictions on freedom of travel and the feeling of being imprisoned behind walls, fences and bars in the GDR are present as a subject in numerous works by the artist. But travel itself is likewise a central subject of her art. In collages, paintings and drawings, she not only processed the fascinating colorfulness and lightness of her travel experiences, but also the intellectual stimulation and the intensity of self-assurance. Her self-portraits while traveling, for example, bear witness to these experiences. With these and other depictions of women she met along the way, Annemirl Bauer reflected not at least on gender roles in society and criticized patriarchal power structures - a recurring theme in her art.

The exhibition shows a selection of works from the artist's extensive estate. It was compiled as part of the research project "Affective Archives - Journeys abroad by artists during the GDR era" at the Technical University of Dresden (Prof. Dr. Kerstin Schankweiler, Jule Lagoda and Nora Kaschuba; sponsored by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation), in cooperation with the Kustodie der TU Dresden (Gwendolin Kremer and Andreas Kempe) and Amrei Bauer (Annemirl Bauer Haus und Archiv/Niederwerbig).