DAS MINSK Kunsthaus, Potsdam
September 2022
September 24, 2022–January 15, 2023
Potsdamer Schrebergärten is the title of Stan Douglas’ photographic series, as well as his exhibition at DAS MINSK Kunsthaus in Potsdam. Created in Potsdam at the beginning of the 90s, the series will be shown together with the film Der Sandmann (1995).
During his one-year residency with the DAAD in Berlin, Stan Douglas captured the city of Potsdam immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall in documentary form: Sacrow, the area around Sanssouci, and the Schlaatz housing estate. This series Potsdamer Schrebergärten (1994/95) captures moments of transition: an abandoned dacha, a former wall fence, gardens that have since disappeared; a “Trabbi” (an East German–produced car) parked before a Kleingarten site. This early series already reveals a theme that Stan Douglas also explores in his later photographs: how cities change over time and how history leaves its traces in the urban landscape, whether in Detroit or Vancouver or in Potsdam. After shooting the photographs in the Schrebergärten, which seem like a typological study, Douglas reconstructed the Schrebergärten in a film studio, so that the garden, even if recreated, becomes a site of artistic production.
The film Der Sandmann consists of a double projection and deals with a “doubled” garden—a Kleingarten at different points in German history, before and after the fall of the Wall. The protagonist Nathanael, a Black German from the former GDR, explains in a letter how a childhood experience in a Potsdam Schrebergarten catches up with him when he revisits the scene twenty years later, after the reunification. Der Sandmann is a film about identity, between memory and repression, and is a film about Doppelgänger, also in German-German history.
Learn more at DAS MINSK Kunsthaus.