image from Eintracht/Zwietracht (Bridge)

Eintracht/Zwietracht (Bridge)

This project is based on a peculiar characteristic of the Glienicker Brücke, a bridge spanning the Havel river that flows between the cities of Berlin and Potsdam. During the Cold War, the border separating the GDR and West Germany ran neatly down the center of the bridge, and between 1962 and 1986 the bridge repeatedly became the scene of spy exchanges.

Today, the only physical remains of this history are a seam in the tarmac and an anomaly in the colour of the of bridge’s paint: while both political systems evidently agreed on the colour green, each interpreted this chromatic category differently. This oscillation between difference and resemblance bears witness to the perplexing structure and relationship of systems — be they political entities or abstract colour systems.

In exhibition, a large wall area is painted with two equally sized, immediately adjacent colour fields. The colours are matched to the specific paints as originally chosen by the West and the East. A photograph of the bridge itself is circulated parallel to the exhibition, as a poster and/or postcard.

Eintracht/Zwietracht (Bridge) disengages the abstract colour system from the historically-charged context and architecture of the bridge. Instead of draining the colours of their political significance, the project seeks to reconnect these historical colours to the political ideology that surrounded American Colour Field Abstraction and Russian Suprematism.