There is an exhibition in prison. It is called CRACK.

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THERE IS AN EXHIBITION IN PRISON.
IT IS CALLED CRACK
Through an examination of the history of the former juvenile prison
in Weimar, we questionthe relationship between the form and
the function of architecture. How can architecture become
dysfunctional with respect to its history, power and visibility?
We aim to explore the former prison through hands on research
and subsequent artistic practice.
Participating Artists:
Vanessa Brazeau, Antonije Burić, Isaac Chong Wai, Burak Erkil,
Jazmin Gabriela Flores del Pozo, Anke Hannemann, Stefan Klein,
Vasili Macharadze, Maayan Miriam Mozes, Atsuko Mochida, Paloma Sanchez-
Palencia, Filipe Serro, Moran Shavit, Natsumi Sugiyama, Daphna Westerman,
Abraham Winterstein, Ada Kai-Ting Yang, Ina Weise
Project by MFA-Program "Public Art and New Artistic Strategies”,
Faculty of Art and Design, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
under the direction of Professor Danica Dakić, Anke Hannemann, Ina Weise and
Jirka Reichmann. Supported by Kreativfonds der Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.
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Photo: Burak Erkil
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Architectual diagram: Carmina Revert

ART vs. LAW
Paloma Sanchez-Palencia & Ina Weise
Piercing in Prison
Atsuko Mochida
Art Key aka Freedom Crack
Die Sonne
I am not ashamed of my religious past
Timeee is on my side, oh yes it is
Antonije Burić
The Nobodies
Jazmin Gabriela Flores del Pozo
The Virtues Project: Easy Jail
Ada Kai-Ting Yang
LET THE NATURE TAKES ITS COURSE
W RALLE
Burak Erkil
Just a Simple Algorithm
Daphna Westerman
Gates
Anki Hannemann & Vasili Macharadze
Under surveillance love must find
a special expression
Filipe Serro
Brüder, Brüder, Brüder
Maayan Miriam Mozes
Empty Cells
Moran Shavit
Moments and Memories from
Collected Elements
Natsumi Sugiyama
NETWORKING
Vanessa Brazeau, Ina Weise, Antonije Burić
Untitled
2015062715273720
Paloma Sanchez-Palencia
SOFIA
Ina Weise
DID YOU HEAR
Man can do what he wants but he
cannot will what he wills
Stefan Klein
Cidade Prisão
ABRAHAM WINTERSTEIN
Prison Body
Vanessa Brazeau
I Made a Boat in Prison
- A Drawing of Sunlight, 2015
I Made a Boat in Prison
- A Journey to the Shore, 2015
Isaac Chong Wai
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THERE IS AN EXHIBITION IN PRISON. IT IS CALLED
CRACK
Prof. Danica Dakić
From May to July 2015, the international students from the Master Program
Public Art and New Artistic Strategies from the Faculty of Fine Art at the Bauhaus-
Universität Weimar grappled with the century-old building which used to house
the youth prison in Weimar. As part of an exhibition project, the building opened
its doors for the first time since its closure several years ago, this time as a place
for artistic production and discourse. This project produced interventions,
participatory work involving children and adolescents, video works, performances,
performative lectures and tours. Besides the exhibition, the site was activated in
a performative workshop led by artist duo Prinz Gholam and in discussions led by
Bauhaus-Universität Weimar’s visiting scholar Dr. Boris Buden. With this artistic
insight, new forms of action were brought to the fore and knowledge production
was developed.
The different cultural perspectives brought together by the program’s international
artists led to highly differentiated artistic engagements with issues such as the
body and limits, freedom and individuality in a complex society.
I would like to thank all the contributing artists and academics, the artistic assistants
Anke Hannemann and Ina Weise, and the coordinator of the MFA-program
Jirka Reichmann, for their participation in the exhibition and the accompanying
publication. THERE IS AN EXHIBITION. IN PRISON IT IS CALLED CRACK was
both an artistic project and a moving collaborative work experience. It was made
possible by the creativity, curiosity, insight and questions of each individual person,
as well as their deep commitment and openness to the project.
My deepest gratitude to all the additional people and institutions that have made
great commitments and contributed financial support to this project, and especially
to the Kreativfonds at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.
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Pierced until the End of Culture
Dr. Boris Buden
In the courtyard of the former prison, in a square space cordoned off by fences,
there is a ping pong table made of concrete. A metal plate divides the table in
two equal halves, replacing the net. Concrete and metal replace wood and string.
The sports equipment should be robust, not only because the court is outdoors.
The purpose it served was also robust- the re-education of young offenders at
the correctional facility in Weimar. But this was a few years ago. The empty cells,
corridors, meeting rooms, and official offices, like the courtyards of the prison,
are now occupied by artists. Two of them, Paloma-Sanchez Palencia and Ina Weise
turned the table tennis court into a work of art by installing a scoreboard on
the surrounding fence. The scoreboard showed two different terms, sometimes
conflicting, in pairs as if the table tennis match were between COMMUNISM and
PORN, SPRING and FREEDOM, TOMATO and SUCCESS, TIME and SCIENCE,
FEMINISM AND INTERNET and so on.
I can hardly imagine a better metaphor for the concept of culture. It is widely
known that the term “culture” encompasses anything from communism,
pornography, spring, freedom, feminism, success, even tomatoes. Even the most
disparate phenomena of human life are found in the concept of culture. It seems
to be able to reconcile the deepest contradictions and to integrate the strangest
experiences. Culture, Raymond Williams wrote in his Keywords in 1976 is “one of
the two or three most complicated words in the English language”. 1 Nevertheless,
he turned explicitly against any attempt to designate a “true” or “scientific” sense
of culture. He knew that the meaning of “culture” cannot be clearly fixed. Instead,
Williams advocated a permanent working process in which the levels of meaning
of the term expand and the relationship between them are reorganized. Actually,
that is exactly what is done in the field of knowledge production according to
Anglo-Saxon and German Cultural Studies. That's also what makes the conceptual
development and practical realization of the idea of “cultural education” possible
and plausible in the wider social space today.
Actually, the association of culture and education in the socio-historical sense is
a relatively old phenomenon. It was initially the Enlightenment, which brought
together these two terms from the outside. “The words enlightenment, culture, and
education are newcomers to our language. They currently belong only to literary
discourse. The masses scarcely understand them” 2 , Moses Mendelssohn wrote
already in 1784 in his essay “On the question: What is Enlightenment?” which was
published in the Berlin Monthly, an important journalistic institution taking part in
the German Enlightenment discussion. Like the more famous essay, “Answering the
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question: What is Enlightenment” by Immanuel Kant, which was published three
months later in the same journal, Mendelssohn's text was a response to the request
from the Protestant pastor Johann Friedrich Zollner to clarify the Enlightenment
itself “before one begins to clarify” 3 anything else.
Let’s set aside how the Enlightenment understood the terms culture and education
and determined their respective social roles. The important thing to note is that we
owe their origins as well as their mutual relationship historically and conceptually to
the Enlightenment, which has essentially determined the historical development of
their meanings. Just as the Enlightenment played a crucial role in the preparation
of the French Revolution, the original German concept of education, implies the
focus of Moses Mendelssohn’s understanding of the Enlightenment, as a call for
changing the world. According to Reinhart Koselleck, one of its main characteristics
is precisely the idea that education offered from the outside is converted into
an autonomous demand from the individual to change the world. 4 The scene
of this world change by the end of the 18th century became history. It is also a
contemporary of the Enlightenment. The modern concept of history, which as
we learned from Koselleck, originated with the Enlightenment, is one of different
speeds and meanings of events of diversified temporality and at the same time a
new space of experience. In short, only with the Enlightenment, did history become
the subject that the modern world knows today.
To further complicate this already complex historical and conceptual constellation,
it should be recalled that at almost the same time (1785) and even in the same
place – the Berlin Monthly – the concept of the "autonomy of art" emerged. One
of the greatest names of classical Weimar, Karl Philipp Moritz, summed up the idea
of Fine Art as “perfected in itself”. Art, he claimed, doesn’t need a relationship to
anything other than itself. 5
That's in a nutshell what one should keep in mind about the history of our problem.
This history should not be ignored if you look at it as an artist, a cultural worker,
even as a citizen interested in culture, a member of the so-called educated class,
and what the question of the meaning and the importance of cultural education
represents as well as the role that art should play in it. The world has changed
a lot since education and culture encountered each other for the first time. The
Enlightenment, which once put these two phenomena in combination, disappeared
rather unheroicly from our historical horizon. Partially due to the dangerous
inconsistency exposed seventy years ago - in Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic
of Enlightenment – which accused it of the worst crimes committed in the past
two centuries of mankind. The new historical revisionism, which is recently winning
increasing importance and influence, finds its rationale for the Gulag and Auschwitz
not least in the ideas of the Enlightenment.
History is no longer the subject. More than that, they say, it no longer exists. We
live in a post-historical period, as said by Fukuyama. The old German concept of
education is no longer. It became less important, or more accurately, it lost the
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the spiritual depth that once secured it a starring role in the historical development
of the nation. One could say that “education” had been flattened, and it was in fact
by one of its former partners in the project of the Enlightenment: culture.
The latter left the era of modernity and emerged as its greatest profiteer. “Culture”
has become the latest valid, and thus significant, determinant of all kinds of social,
political, historical, economic, environmental, ethical, even individually-existential
conditions. 6 It is the thing that confidently dominates today’s broader logic of world
views and representations (art included) so that you can say: If culture today speaks
of the world, it speaks not only about itself, but also to itself. 7
So much for the context in which the concept of cultural education searches for
a practical connection to reality. It also explains what “cultural” in the concept of
cultural education actually refers to - namely culture “in the narrowest sense”, more
specifically, the arts in general, all artistic and aesthetic practices in visual arts,
literature, the theater or film, including applied arts such as design and architecture.
In fact, one introduces a subset of culture within a broader sense. But here is where
the real problem begins: What is the relationship of this part to the whole of
culture? And, more importantly: As far as the whole of culture today knows nothing
outside of itself - how can a part of this whole still have a relationship with anything
other than culture, like with society, politics, labor or the state? Or is culture in
the broadest sense the only thing that art today can still refer to? And how is one
to imagine the autonomy and freedom of art under these circumstances?
The artwork mentioned earlier gives us the best metaphorical answer to this
question. Art today finds its autonomous space, where it can articulate itself free
from ideology or political abuse, only in the prison of culture. Here alone, may it
live out its social roles according to its own will and develop its political effects, or
follow higher historical purposes – to the extent, and only to the extent, it does not
exceed the boundaries of the space of culture. Or it can rebel against it.
Atsuko Mochida, another participant in the project by the students of the MFA
program Public Art and New Artistic Strategies of the Bauhaus University Weimar,
pierced the walls of the prison, and fed a huge steel ring through the building. Her
work Piercing the Prison combined four prison cells, the courtyard, the outer wall,
and the "freedom" outside of the prison.
So there is a space outside of culture, where you can still capture society, politics
and work within their respective realities. It seems only art can remind us of that.
That and nothing else should be its role in the project of cultural education.
1 Raymond Williams, Keywords. A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1976, S. 79.
2 Moses Mendelssohn, „Ueber die Frage: was heißt aufklären?“, in: Berlinische Monatsschrift, 1784, Neuntes Stück, S. 193.
3 Johann Friedrich Zöllner, „Ist es rathsam, das Ehebündnis ferner durch die Religion zu sancieren?“, in: Berlinische Monatsschrift,
1783, Zwölftes Stück, S. 516.
4 Siehe Reinhart Koselleck, „On the Anthropological and Semantic Structure of Bildung“, in: derselbe,
The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002, S. 174.
5 Karl Philipp Moritz, Werke in zwei Bänden. Band 1, Berlin und Weimar 1973, S. 203–211.
Erstdruck in: Berlinische Monatsschrift, 1785, 3. Stück.
6 Siehe Stefan Nowotny, „Kultur” in der politischen Moderne: Versuch über die Institution eines Begriffs,
Dissertation an der Université Catholique de Louvain, 2012, S. 198.
7 Benjamin Kunkel, Utopia or Bust. A Guide to the Present Crisis, London, New York: Verso, 2014, S. 60.
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ART vs. LAW
Paloma Sanchez-Palencia & Ina Weise
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A scoreboard is positioned next to a ping pong table in the former
juvenile detention center in Weimar. ART VS. LAW is an interactive
installation which re-activates the space formerly used as a recreation
area for young prisoners. Instead of using the names of two players,
the score board displays diverse topics such as feminism, art, law,
money, freedom, communism, children, crack, and more.
These topics are selected and switched around on the scoreboard
during each round.
The topics, presented in opposition to each other, generate unique
pairings and unexpected questions. Some of these questions were
premeditated during the making of the work (ART VS. LAW) while
others are random and absurd (BRITNEY vs. FREEDOM).
The players interchange the topics themselves creating a game
which suits their preferences. They determine what the match is
about and which topic will prevail.
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Piercing in Prison
Atsuko Mochida
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The big steel ring is inserted into the prison.
It goes through four cells, the prison alley, the outer wall and
a garden where the neighboring art space is located.
It connects each space and works as the first crack in a portal
from the inside out, and the outside in.
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Art Key aka Freedom Crack
Antonije Burić
“At least during the regime of Slobodan Milosevic,
we had someone to fight against.”
-Someone from the ex-Yugoslavian R’N’R scene
Let me say from the very beginning: the copy of the prison key should
have been made out of steel.
Artists came to prison after it closed. The place is an instrument of
oppression; a symbol of fighting against crime. One role is justified, the
other is not. I am interested in its role as an instrument used to punish
and prosecute freedom of speech and expression. So, what are artists
doing in such a place? Using its astonishing yet terrifying environment?
Coming to laugh at the dead body of the oppressor? Or mourn over
the very same body? If art is not political, it tends to be decorative, but
it may be that artists want to express more than one beautifully evoked
marble leaf.
In the movie The Matrix, humanity is asleep while being used as the
power source for AI machines. Their minds are entertained with the
Matrix program which simulates civilization as it is now. Of course there is
resistance outside of the program, fighting a superior machine oppressor.
In one scene, a program in charge of hunting down rebels explains the
true nature of the Matrix.
Agent Smith: Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a
perfect human world, where no one suffered and everyone was happy?
It was a disaster; no one would accept the program and entire human
crops were lost. Some believed that we lacked the programming
language to describe your perfect world but I believe that the human
beings define their reality through misery and suffering. A perfect world
was the dream from which your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake
up. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned into this, the peak of your
(capitalistic) civilization”.
Clever?
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Unfortunately this is not about The Matrix so I will not go deep into it.
But it is interesting to consider humanity, not as the perfect (whatever
that could mean) organism, but rather as the symbiosis between the
oppressed and the oppressor. The resistance doesn’t really want to
defeat the oppressor. If it happens that the oppressor is destroyed, it
would be good if he could be resurrected. Then the whole “das Gute
gegen das Böse” ballet could start again.
What would happen if the freedom crack sucked in all suppression,
restriction or punishment?
I found the key of the former prison door as the ideal object to use as a
medium. It is an archetype of a key, I do not even need to show you a
photo of it- you know what it looks like. And it opens the “door” of the
prison, literary. Due to the technology, I was able to make an unlimited
amount of plastic replicas which can unlock the door. I called them Art
Keys and visitors could take them in exchange for whatever they think
the artwork is worth. I find it quite honest, especially the moment when
somebody exchanged an old condom for the new one. I should not say
it openly but the ‘real key is with me. A prison owner has an identical
steel copy. No one knows.
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Die Sonne
Antonije Burić
On the 9th of July, in the former prison courtyard, in the small city of
Weimar, at 5 pm, I am seizing the opportunity, using already placed
mirrors, to ask the question. I will ask the same thing every 15 minutes
until 7:15 pm. It will only last for three days, for now.
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Performance, Mirrors placed in such a way so they can throw sunlight in the direction of entrance door

I am not ashamed of my religious past
Intervention in the space. Ornaments in the prison’s chapel which were destroyed
or damaged are fixed in the same manner as the rest of the environment.
The intervention is practically invisible.
Timeee is on my side, oh yes it is
Performance, Antonije Burić in collaboration with stone
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The Nobodies
Jazmin Gabriela Flores del Pozo
This was an installation in one of the cells of the prison (JVA-Weimar).
I made a path with dead insects. I collected most of them in the jail,
while I bought the others. I tried to create a link between migration and
fragility - as well as elude to loopholes in the law concerning migrants.
In their own environment, all of these insects are invisible or camouflaged
in nature. But in an urban environment, they are completely vulnerable.
Flies and bees, butterflies and the beetles are exposed. In public space,
people are supposedly part of a mass without identity.
But what happens with people of different races, genders or ages,
who are excluded from it?
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The Virtues Project: Easy Jail
Ada Kai-Ting Yang
For the exhibition, Ada Kai-Ting Yang made a performance titled
The Virtues Project: Easy Jail. It dealt with moral education and artistic
labor in public space. Yang was performing in costume and wearing an
oversized orange prison jumpsuit in the former juvenile prison in Weimar.
While the performance was taking place, the words ‘Nothing Compares’
were audible, playing on a loop over a speaker system, edited from the
song Nothing Compares 2 U (released on January 8, 1990) by Sinéad
O’Connor.
During the performance, the artist used spray-paint and masking tape to
write Chinese Calligraphy between stairs indicating eight virtues that are
moral foundations of society in the Chinese cultural sphere:
loyalty ( 忠 ), filial piety ( 孝 ), benevolence ( 仁 ), love ( 愛 ), honesty ( 信 ),
justice ( 義 ), harmony ( 和 ) and equality ( 平 ).
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Performance on July 10, 2015
Videographer James Early still images cropped by Ada Kai-Ting Yang
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(1) LET THE NATURE TAKES ITS COURSE, (2) W RALLE
Burak Erkil
Performance and intervention are practices of abstraction, combining a
bodily experience beyond their ostensible meanings, with an imitation of
nature’s sweet revenge, which comes after the closing of this specific site.
It can now be seen on a white display, in HD format (1) while ex-inmate
Ralle from Berlin talks about his dreams, nature, and how he takes care of
his ‘lovely’ snakes, as their one and only guardian. (2)
‘’Such would be the successive phases of the image:
In the first case, the image has a good appearance; representation is
of the sacramental order. In the second, it is an evil appearance; it is of
the order of maleficence. In the third, it plays at being an appearance -
it is of the order of sorcery. In the fourth, it is no longer of the order of
appearances, but of simulation.’’
‘’More interesting is the illusion of filming the Louds as if TV wasn't there.
The producer's triumph was to say: "They lived as if we were not there."
An absurd, paradoxical formula - neither true nor false: Utopian.
The "as if we were not there" being equal to "as if you were there."
It is this Utopia, this paradox that fascinated the twenty million viewers,
much more than the "perverse" pleasure of violating someone's
privacy did. In the"verite" experience it is not a question of secrecy or
perversion, but of a sort of frisson of the real, or of an aesthetics of
the hyperreal, a frisson of vertiginous and phony exactitude, a frisson of
simultaneous distancing and magnification, of distortion of scale,
of an excessive transparency. The pleasure of an excess of meaning,
when the bar of the sign falls below the usual waterline of meaning:
the nonsignifier is exalted by the camera angle. There, one sees what
the real never was (but "as if you were there"), without the distance that
gives us perspectival space and depth of vision (but "more real than
nature"). Pleasure in the microscopic simulation that allows the real to
pass into the hyperreal. (This is also somewhat the case in porno, which is
fascinating more on a metaphysical than on a sexual level.)’’
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Just a Simple Algorithm
Daphna Westerman
Sixteen stones divided into four groups of four are placed on a table in
a prison cell. One stone is being picked up from the upper-left side of
the upper-left group. The stone is put in a mouth. The mouth is sucking
the stone. A stone from the upper-left side of the lower-left group is
being picked up and put in the place where the first stone was. A stone
from the upper-left side of the lower-right group is being picked up and
put in the place where the second picked-up stone had been. A stone
from the upper-left side of the upper-right group is being picked up and
put in the place of the third picked-up stone. The first stone is taken out
of the mouth and put on the upper-left side of the upper-right group.
The algorithm has been chosen.
The mind will be disciplined.
The order will be kept.
Just a Simple Algorithm was inspired by Samuel Beckett’s novel Molloy.
Following Molloy, who tried to find a systematic way of sucking stones
in the correct order while they were divided into four groups of four
in each of his pockets,
I tried to continue the algorithm so as to maintain the order.
During the performance, the audience was invited to write
a “Performance Protocol” and to document the happening.
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Gates
Anke Hannemann & Vasili Macharadze
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The work entails a full automation of the prison’s two-part entrance,
the lock system through which prisoners were brought by car, creating
a semi-conductive transition between the public areas, providing
a moderate discharging process, necessary for conciliation.
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Under surveillance love must find a special expression
Filipe Serro
“ Prison is a place of prohibition, and thus of secrets and
infringements - at least in the hope and imagination of
its inmates.” - Harun Farocki, “Prison Images” (2000)
In the context of incarceration, the surveillance camera is the eye of
God: both haunting and revered, it sees everything but never directly
intervenes. Just like God, the CCTV camera never forgets, registering
actions and interactions into ever-growing archives of digital data, which
hold the secrets of human nature. Exploring the relationship between
the divine and the deviant, the video installation creates a fictional
universe of homoerotic tension between two inmates in separate cells.
Arguably an integral part of human nature, love - along with the nearby
notions of sex, desire, seduction and longing - will always find a way to
express itself, even under close watch.
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I Made a Boat in Prison - A Drawing of Sunlight
Isaac Chong Wai
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I received permission to cut the fence of the former juvenile prison in
Weimar to make a boat. I cut the fence in a garden where prisoners used
to spend their free time. Through the changing sunlight, the shadows
draw on the ground of the garden over time.
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I Made a Boat in Prison - A Journey to the Shore
Isaac Chong Wai
I used the wire fence of the prison to make a boat
and I put it in the chapel.
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Brüder, Brüder, Brüder
Maayan Miriam Mozes
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Full HD single video channel, 3min 46sec.
Four-chapter video of four young offenders.
The video follows a group of young offenders who have dropped out
of society. By using self-invented hand gestures, they create a new
language to communicate with. Some of the gestures can be recognized
from common body language, whereas others stay enigmatic. Chapter
by chapter, the video gets closer to the group, exposing individual and
collective intimacies.
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Empty cells
Moran Shavit
Above: the outside is in sight but out of reach Below: Cell 222 is turned to a camera obscure
Cell 222 (projection)
If you looked through the window you could see the outside, within sight but out of reach.
Through a simple manipulation of the light coming through the window, I turned the cell to
a camera obscura. Entering the cell, one should take the time and get used to the darkness.
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2 empty cells,
with a slight intervention, go through a transformation.
Above: documentation of the walking in cell 116
Below: Cell 116 during the exhibition
Cell 116 (sound installation)
I walked back and forth in the cell, experienced its limits through my movement within it.
This action was recorded and will be played behind a closed door during the exhibition.
The work is offering the possibility to get the notion of the space through the sound of this action.
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Moments and Memories from Collected Elements
Natsumi Sugiyama
The work is an installation with a site-specific book.
The room is the prison’s former library.
The illustrated pages are based on collected elements from within
the former prison, which is currently empty.
The elements are marks, stains, rubbish, and some other small things that
subtly tell us about the days and emotions of the people who have been
there. I tried to read meanings of these elements and found simple words
to reinforce what I imagined them to be. I intended for visitors to seek
out the elements that I collected after they finished reading the book,
and to effectively experience far more than is visible in the present space.
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NETWORKING
Vanessa Brazeau, Antonije Buric, Ina Weise
Vanessa had an idea to make a hammock from the safety net at
the former JVA Weimar, but didn't. So in a minor criminal act,
Ina and Antonjie produced it without her knowledge.
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Untitled
basketball
Paloma Sanchez-Palencia
There is a small basketball in the middle of a cell.
It is the memory of a frustrating event from childhood.
It is an installation that happened by chance. (The result of the action is
presented undocumented but it truly happened once again, I lost a ball.)
Some of the prison cells were locked during the period of our in situ
research process, the only access to those cells was through a 21 x 10
cm window on the solid metal door. One day, kicking a mini basketball
against the cell door number, it accidentally went through the window in
the door and landed right in the exact middle of the cell.
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2015062715273720
(mobile phone jammer)
Paloma Sanchez-Palencia
buy something illegal (you can find it online)
print the official legislation (you can find it online)
show them together
for the title use your online order number
Again, the idea of crime carefully studied and confessed.
In a prison cell of the former JVA in Weimar, a mobile phone jammer
was placed: an apparatus which is illegal in the EU with the capacity of
interfering with 3G mobile signals, and turning them off.
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SOFIA
Ina Weise
In a prison cell, the steel bars have been removed from
the window and curtains are hung from the inside.
The German figure of speech “sitting behind Swedish curtains” (hinter
schwedischen Gardinen sitzen) means to be imprisoned. The expression
is based on the fact that prison bars were produced from Swedish steel,
which was considered particularly strong.
The title SOFIA refers to a product at IKEA, the Swedish furniture store.
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DID YOU HEAR
Stefan Klein
During the exhibition in the former juvenile prison (JVA Weimar) a rumour
was spread in an ongoing performance over the course of three days:
Did you hear ... that they are thinking of housing refugees
in this building after the exhibition is finished?
A rumor can be a very hurtful tool, a way of propaganda. From myth and
legend, it is distinguished by its emphasis on the topical: whereas humor
is designed to provoke laughter, rumor begs for belief.
In contradiction to its content, the way a rumor is passed on is a very
personal moment: leaning in to whisper something in somebody’s ear,
slightly touching bodies of stranger, it has a subtly intimate touch to it.
The way the sentence and its content changes every time it is passed on
from person to person, it resembles an object that is constantly changing.
It is a possibility, an attempt to show something that cannot be seen.
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Man can do what he wants but he cannot will what he wills
Stefan Klein
Performance featuring José Lòpez 9.7.2015
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Cidade Prisão
ABRAHAM WINTERSTEIN
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Video: 42min 32sec, Havana, Cuba
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Prison Body
Vanessa Brazeau
Artists and the public were encouraged to join a fitness class in
the former JVA Weimar. The architecture of the prison, along with
whatever had been left behind, were used to improve the physical form
of the participants. Simultaneously, artist Vanessa Brazeau trained herself
in the empty prison, documenting her transformation, and seeing
the changes made to her body as she morphed into a sculpture of
the prison’s architecture.
Prison Body can be understood as a critique of the capitalization of
significant spaces that have become dysfunctional. Prisons are spaces
that encourage physical improvement as they are characterized by two
main circumstances essential for success in fitness; time and discipline.
Ironically, our neoliberal society characterizes a fit, disciplined individual
as an ideal citizen.
In former Prisoner Daniel Genis’ words:
“. . . since they have the time and dedication, many inmates come out of
prison in excellent [physical] form. Which they lose immediately. Having
a "prison build" lasts a few months. These are not the kinds of men who
join the New York Health and Racquet Club, and outside, they have other
problems—poverty, unemployment, child support, addiction, and parole
requirements—that keep them from their old jail-yard hobby. I have seen
many a man return to prison on a parole violation and have to start all
over in the weight yard”.
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Imprint
THERE IS AN EXHIBITION IN PRISON. IT IS CALLED CRACK
A project by MFA-Program „Public Art and New Artistic Strategies /
Kunst im öffentlichen Raum und neue künstlerische Strategien“,
Faculty of Art and Design, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
July 9th - 12th 2015
Former juvenile prison (Jugendarrestanstalt) in Weimar, Germany
Teaching team
Prof. Danica Dakić, Dr. Boris Buden, Anke Hannemann, Ina Weise
Project coordinator
Jirka Reichmann
MFA-Program „Public Art and New Artistic Strategies /
Kunst im öffentlichen Raum und neue künstlerische Strategien“
Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
Geschwister-Scholl-Straße 7
99423 Weimar
Tel. +49 (0) 3643 / 58 33 92
Fax +49 (0) 3643 / 58 14 33 92
www.uni-weimar.de/mfa
This catalogue is published to accompany the artistic research and exhibition project
THERE IS AN EXHIBITION IN PRISON. IT IS CALLED CRACK, April-July 2015
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Editor
MFA-Program „Public Art and New Artistic Strategies /
Kunst im öffentlichen Raum und neue künstlerische Strategien“,
Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
Texts
Danica Dakić, Boris Buden
Photographers
The artists, unless otherwise stated
Graphic design
Natsumi Sugiyama
Translation
Danielle Kourtesis
Proofreading
Vanessa Brazeau, Danielle Kourtesis, Ina Weise
Edition
200
2016 @ MFA-Program „Public Art and New Artistic Strategies /
Kunst im öffentlichen Raum und neue künstlerische Strategien“,
Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, the artists, and the autors
All rights, especially the right of any form of reproduction, and
distribution as well as translation, also of parts, are reserved.
Funded by
Kreativfonds der Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
With the kind support of
Thüringer Liegenschaftsmanagement
Frau Nairz, Herr Fischer
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