Now on view: “zurückbleiben bitte”

The exhibition title zurückbleiben bitte (“please stand back”) is a warning, an instruction and a familiar announcement heard every day on Berlin’s underground network. The underground is a place of constant movement. People meet briefly and remain mostly anonymous. On average, passengers spend 62 minutes a day in this environment. The works in this exhibition question the boundary between documentation and fiction. They focus on spaces beyond identity, memory and belonging.

Public space appears here as an environment with its own atmosphere and visible traces of human presence. The exhibition brings together two series of works. Both explore life in the contemporary metropolis. The works were created not only about transit spaces, but directly within them. Underground stations, trains and passageways became both workplace and exhibition space. Anthropologist Marc Augé described such places as “non-places”.