© Michaela Melián / VG Bildkunst
Wandbild Halle, 2004
Mural for the 6th Werkleitz Biennale Common Property / Allgemeingut
Rubber stamp, ink on wall, stamp 1 x 1cm
Installation view, Halle / Saale, Weinecksaal at Volkspalast Halle
4,50 x 17,80 m
Photo: Werkleitz Biennale
As art format the mural is common property. The thematic starting point of Wandbild Halle is GDR prefabricated high-rise housing and West German social housing, both of which harked back to the aesthetic and sociopolitical ideas and models of the Bauhaus. But today these buildings are being demolished or have become social hotspots.
The drawing assimilates images of modern apartment housing in East and West Germany, especially buildings in Halle Neustadt, one of the GDR’s big and ambitious construction projects. Elements of the murals on the facades of the prefabricated high-rise blocks of Halle Neustadt have been assimilated into the new mural.
The central figure of the mural is Tamara Bunke. Various public establishments in the GDR were named after her. The portraits of Tamara Bunke were produced from drawings done for the exhibition Subjekt Prädikat Objekt at the Barbara Gross Galerie, Munich, in 1991. Tamara Bunke, a GDR citizen, went to revolutionary Cuba in 1961, working there on a Committee for the Defense of the Revolution, in the literacy campaign, and for women’s advancement. In 1963 she became a guerrilla under the codename “Tania.” In October 1967 she was shot crossing the Rio Grande.
During her involvement with the SLA (Symbionese Liberation Army) Patricia Hearst, following Tamara Bunke, also called herself Tania.
Wandbild Halle, 2004
Mural for the 6th Werkleitz Biennale Common Property / Allgemeingut
Rubber stamp ink on wall, stamp 1 x 1cm
Installation view, Halle / Saale, Weinecksaal at Volkspalast Halle
4,50 x 17,80 m
Photomontage: Michaela Melián
Wandbild Halle, 2004
Mural, rubber stamp ink on wall, stamp 1 x 1cm, Detail (Tania)
Photo: Michaela Melián
Wandbild Halle, 2004
Mural, rubber stamp ink on wall, stamp 1 x 1cm, Detail (Thälmann Chor)
Photo: Michaela Melián
Wandbild Halle, 2004
Mural, rubber stamp ink on wall, stamp 1 x 1cm, Detail
Photo: Michaela Melián
For the 6th Werkleitz Biennale in Halle in 2004, Melián designed the mural Wandbild Halle to celebrate another heroine whose memory is fading: Tamara Bunke, who left the former GDR to join Che Guevara’s Cuban guerilla army, was shot in an ambush in Bolivia, and was resurrected by Patty Hearst who assumed Bunke’s nom de guerre, ‘Tania’, when she became a terrorist. In Melián’s mural, Bunke’s features tower over the sketchily drawn outlines of functionalist apartment blocks from two satellite towns in the former East and West Germany, Halle-Neustadt and Munich Neuperlach. The resemblance between the towns is striking as both were built in the same modernist spirit: Melián has set the stage for a drama in which the histories of the two Germanies are unexpectedly connected through the shared project of a socialist modernism. But, she has also cast a female heroine as the drama’s protagonist, potentially as a reminder of the fact that (despite its ideological bias) the culture of Socialism had developed a whole iconography around the notion of female heroicism which was discarded with the demise of the GDR. The work thus raises the questions: could the dominant view of the GDR as the alien other of West Germany be revised? Could something about the socialist iconography of strong women be redeemed? What community could possibly assemble in front of this mural? Whose heroine could Bunke be today?
The Wandbild Halle seems paradigmatic of Melián’s work in that it epitomizes how the artist breaks up monolithic accounts of history by addressing the past (and its alternate possible futures) through evocative gestures. In doing so, she politicizes the work of memory by drawing attention to stories eclipsed by dominant ideological narrations as well as by proposing significantly different ways to tell these stories. Her works thus become blueprints for an approach to history in which the alacrity of deconstructive criticism is intimately tied to an appreciation of people whose life and work made a difference.
excerpt from
Jan Verwoert: Past, Present and Future
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