On Mühlenstraße,. in the centre of Berlin, 1316m of the Berlin Wall still remains. It serves as a reminder of the heritage of the city. It is home to the East side Gallery – a collection of murals decorating the wall, that is a popular tourist spot and receives millions of visitors a year. It is the longest ‘outdoor’ gallery in the world. In February of 2019 I visited the gallery and found the experience to be very profound and emotional. According to the Künstlerinitiative East Side Gallery, an association of the artists involved in the project, "The East Side Gallery is understood as a monument to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the peaceful negotiation of borders and conventions between societies and people”. Many of the 118 artists painted murals with significance to the building of or the fall of the wall. One of the first murals to be painted on the wall was ‘Cartoon Heads’ by Thierry Noir. This was a significant mural as Noir had often put his own life at risk before the demolition, attempting to paint the wall. The mural itself, is brightly coloured, graphic and bold and features a series of heads almost at the entire height of the structure. ‘It Happened in November’ by Kani Alavi is more of an interpretation of the events of 1990. Alavi painted an abstract construction of the people of east Germany storming through checkpoint Charlie on the day the wall fell, towards the west. The sea of faces holds a range of emotion. This piece is particularly jarring for its representation of the people of Germany at the time and the mass significance of this point in history.
Birgit Kinder’s ‘Break to the West’ features a Trabant car, a recognisable symbol of communist east Germany, breaking through the middle of the wall. This is reminiscent of the people who tried to escape. Many people find this piece one of the most compelling and iconic murals of the wall alongside ‘The Fraternal Kiss’ or ‘My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love’ by Dmitri Wrubel which is arguably the most recognisable. In 1979, a photo was captured during the 30th anniversary of the foundation of the German Democratic Republic. A lot of critics have described the painting as ‘straightforward’ and say it holds a lot less meaning than some of the other pieces in the gallery. Wrubel counteracted this criticism by explaining that "In this painting, there's one German and one Russian, and the Berlin Wall is about the same thing but in reverse: here, there's total love, while the Berlin Wall separates two worlds — it was a perfect fit." The murals of the wall have proven very educational, particularly to younger generations, as a powerful means of drawing attention to this period of time and opening the mind to further education on the matter.
The beauty of the East Side Gallery is that the murals would not work as well in a different context. The locational identity of the gallery provides a more intense meaning to each painting. If each piece was displayed in a traditional gallery, they wouldn’t have the significance they do on the wall. This makes the work site specific as it was created with the location in mind and it exists on the wall specifically; it couldn’t be moved and have the same presence. Having the ability to see and touch the wall, made the experience so much more personal to me, even though I have no ties to the history of the wall. The artist using the wall as a canvas allows the audience to be a part of the art as it is more interactive than just seeing it hanging on the wall of a museum. In my opinion, I prefer this non-traditional context because I believe the informality allows for a stronger connection between the work and the individual viewing it.
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