THERE IS NO THERE THERE: Exhibition at Frankfurt Museum of Modern Art

In the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, numerous artists from abroad were working in both the GDR and the FRG. Within the framework of grants and bilateral cultural agreements, and alongside migrant workers, exiles, and refugees, they came to a divided Germany during the Cold War to continue working on their art and to collaborate and exchange with other artists. Some were themselves migrant workers who only later became artists.

Memories of people and landscapes, colors, forms, and visual traditions found their way into their works. Fleeing their native countries and living in exile in their new homeland, political conditions as well as daily work and life became their new pictorial themes.

Marginalized within the institutionalized art world due to structural exclusions, the artists nevertheless decisively expanded the discourses on art in both post-National-Socialist Germanys. In doing so, they opened up the possibility of seeing different things and, hence, seeing differently.

The exhibition There is no there there testifies to the richness of their artistic work and the transformative power that works of art can unleash. While what they left behind inevitably changes, the artists directly change the present.

Curated by Gürsoy Doğtaş and Susanne Pfeffer