David Polzin
Zeit des Sitzens
November 28, 2021 to January 29, 2022
Potsdamer Str. 97, 10785 Berlin
Each historiography always creates its own image of the past and thus chooses its own icons and hero:ines, who seem to initiate fundamental upheavals. Gaps arise, especially at the moment of selection, which causes forgotten or hidden stories. The history of East Germany is marked by gaps that arose from the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ongoing process of reunification.
David Polzin, born in Hennigsdorf in the former GDR in 1982, not only works on these gaps in his artistic practice, but uses them to push the development of new perspectives. In sculptural, graphic, architectural and also filmic works he traces the social developments in East and West Germany with the help of history and thus finds a way to renegotiate life in the former GDR and East Germany.
It is the chairs, that enable Polzin in the current exhibition "Times of Sitting" to create a new fictional design history. The core of the exhibition is the first of four episodes of the film of the same name, which was developed in collaboration with the sculptor Anna Herms. In the role of the director of the fictional collection "GOOD DESIGN from 60 Years of Germany", Polzin as Maximilianus Nadènne meets the fictional design icon Christina Zierakc to uncover a success story of the "Exile Collective". According to Polzin's narrative, this has fundamentally influenced the "Federal German design history", while their furniture was considered to be "unseatable" and the "most uncomfortable".
In the form of a retrospective, Polzin succeeds in weaving new hero:ines and trends into the history of design, while humorously criticizing the power relations that are always inherent in specific histories. By creating new players of the "Federal German Design History", he points precisely to the gaps and leaves us with the thought, that history is anything but a completed time frame of the past.
Photograph by Eric Tschernow
© Klosterfelde Edition & the Artist
Click here for available artworks by David Polzin