Haus der Mitte

paperfrotage, wood glue, firecracker, acrylic colors
groupshow ”Haus der Mitte“ with the artists of the Galerie Kai Hölzner, Berlin with Klaus Kleine, 5,00 x 2,50 m, 2008

The ‘Haus der Mitte’, a youth club in Berlin`s Gropiusstadt, was the place where Christiane F. came into contact with drugs for the first time. Contrary to the expectations of its director, the pastor Jürgen Quandt, whose goal was to give political education to neglected teenagers, the ‘Haus der Mitte’ became a place of deep transgression. At the End of the 70s, it often took only a few months between smoking cannabis in the basement of the club and the first sniff in the S.O.U.N.D, ‘europe`s state-of-the-art’ discotheque, on Genthiner Straße in Berlin to the final golden shot in one of the toilets at Bahnhof Zoo. It is widely believed that the modern architecture in places like Gropiusstadt or Märkisches Viertel in Berlin, Hasenbergl in Munich, the Vahr in Bremen or Chorweiler in Cologne merely represent the failure of a great social utopia. In fact due to Brutalist, aggregate architecture built for purely functional reasons, dystopic energies were imprinted into these buildings right from the start, spreading their destructive force into the bodies of their inhabitants in no time. It was the reverse side of the glamorous disco age when the big smack was eating itself through the physis and psyche of both teenagers and young adults. Berlin was considered the world capital of drugs. Young people moving to the island of Berlin chartered on a ghost ship, supposedly with no return in the eyes of their parents. There were daily reports of adulescent drug victims on the news illustrated in black and white, contortedly lying next to the toilet. The hardly visible puncture left in the armpit by the needle after the first shot is the point where the parallels of glam and camp, launched simultanuesly in the 70’s, meet in the infinity, marking the line behind which the misery of reality begins.Featuring a wall relief, information, objects, installations and drawings the exhibition sends the showroom located in the “Neues Zentrum Kreuzberg” on a journey from an adolescent bedsit beyond the youth centre into the pedestrian zone to the backyard of an unrestructured old building.

Galerie Kai Hölzner