Some time ago, when summer had just begun, about eighty people met on the roof terrace of a new building near Berlin's Kurfürstendamm.
The house is one of the odd new builds that have been erected here in recent years - beige sandstone facade, entrance with lots of marble, discreet elevators with brown-steamed mirrors that are meant to make you look healthier and less stressed than you might be, below few office floors and upstairs ridiculously expensive apartments that nobody ever lives in because they were only bought as an investment.
Somehow, however, Olga Hohmann's gallery owner managed to get hold of one of these theater apartments for one evening,
Nicholas Mak
Editor in the Feuilleton.
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The evening was something of a secret meeting: the performance had just been announced somewhere on Instagram, you had to have heard about it.
A thunderstorm blew up, the Mercedes star at the Europa Center turned and shone like one of the last representatives of the German economic miracle against a darkening sky – which went quite well with the texts that were about to be read out here and which, among other things, were written by a Germans, who moved to northern Italy as a nuclear researcher in the 1950s, dealt with his nuclear family and the life of his granddaughter, who grew up in West Berlin in the 1990s and 2000s.
Someone shouted that it was time to start, a musician played sound collages, the guests sat huddled together on the floor, and the artist Olga Hohmann entered the kitchen block and began to read a few texts that were so surprising and clever that you couldn't help but think of them less than a hundred years ago, a young poet named Mascha Kaléko was sitting in the Romanisches Café, writing and reading poems that still tell more about the magic and abysses of Berlin in the 1920s than most history books.
Image strategies of totalitarian systems
Olga Hohmann is one of the most invisible and most talked about phenomena in Berlin.
She's known for such semi-clandestine performances;
sometimes she invites people to her apartment for evenings where she cooks and sings, sometimes she sets up a bar in an underpass somewhere in West Berlin and shows art films, sometimes she reads texts in an investor's apartment.
And one cannot say exactly whether what took place there was a reading and thus "literature" or a performance and thus "art" according to the classic categories on which the sorting-friendly German cultural scene often insists so bitterly.
Perhaps this genre rupture is also indicative of a new generation of artists who no longer care about these very divisions, who deal with language differently and see writing as part of an expanded artistic practice.
In doing so, they go further than the generation of Barbara Kruger, who is regarded as a pioneer of word images, text posters and artist books and who reflected the text strategies of mass media and advertising in her works.
Cemile Sahin, who was born in 1991, was already successful in the literary world three years ago with her novel “Taxi”, while at the same time she is considered one of the most important new voices in the art system, dissecting the narratives and visual strategies of totalitarian systems.