About the project

1989–2009: Turbulent World – Telling Time
Jule Reuter, curator

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is suddenly back: the year “1989” – in countless television broadcasts, in recurring pictures of the events surrounding the ninth of November, in announcements of various events recalling the peaceful revolution. Important as these ritualized forms of remembrance are for the transmission of a collectively shared knowledge about the past, it is more important to go beyond the long-term study of documents from that period and to interpret the historical process from other, unexpected perspectives. That is the goal of this exhibition, which confronts the sweeping ramifications of this epochal transformation, considering developments not only within Germany but also far beyond its boundaries, in countries that once belonged to the Soviet Union.More ...

Greeting

Contemporary photography and video works from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Germany provide us with a look back on “turbulent worlds”.More ...

Introduction by Johannes Ebert, Director of the Eastern European/Central Asian region of the Goethe-Institut

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 is not only the symptom and most important symbol of Germany’s unification. Throughout the world, it also represents self-liberation from the shackles of a repressive government, the overcoming of a schism in the heart of Europe, and basic geopolitical changes that continue to have a profound effect on individual lives. More ...

Against Speechlessness, or: Whose History Counts?

Anyone who looks back to 1989, the year of the “Wende” or transformation, from today’s perspective is confronted at first with an odd paradox. Back then, intellectual opinion formers unanimously declared the annus mirabilis to be a momentous caesura of world-historical proportions. Today, barely 20 years later, that once ubiquitous belief in miracles is practically gone. More ...