Life in a Monument – A Double Exhibition by Bettina Cohnen and THE LINK
Talk with the artist Bettina Cohnen and the curators Hendrik Bohle and Jan Dimog.
What is it like to live and work in modernist monuments? What makes living in the Hansaviertel and Karl-Marx-Allee special? Why do both areas represent the once divided and now united Berlin? The photo artist Bettina Cohnen uses these questions as the basis for her portraits of the residents and their flats. She looks behind the mere image. “Life in a Monument” combines architectural-cultural mediation with a cross-district approach: we show the portraits from the Hansa Quarter in the Haus des Lehrers at Alexanderplatz, and the people photographed on Karl-Marx-Allee are in turn presented in the Hansa Library. Monuments and people in East and West are interwoven. The double exhibition is embedded in the programme of the Triennale der Moderne 2022, the supra-regional building culture festival on the visions of German architectural modernism.
Triennale der Moderne 2022: “Living. Work. Live.” https://triennale-der-moderne.de/
Bettina Cohnen is an internationally working photo artist with numerous solo and group exhibitions. She is a master student of Ulrich Eller, artist and professor for sound sculpture / sound installation. In her photographs, Cohnen stages people in their environment and, in the staging, searches for realities of life that are hidden behind the pure image.
http://bettinacohnen.com/
The architect Hendrik Bohle and the journalist Jan Dimog are THE LINK https://thelink.berlin together.
They write books, curate exhibitions and publish about architecture on various digital platforms. Their contributions to the award-winning architecture guide series by DOM publishers are the Istanbul, United Arab Emirates, Kabul and Slovenia editions.
