Joanna Rajkowska at Polnisches Institut Berlin

The Polnisches Institut, Berlin recently opened the exhibition “Sumpfstadt” with photographic works by Joanna Rajkowska. I dropped in and took a glimpse inside.

Berlin in the marsh. Views of a city as if it was part of the marsh that one sees in the fore- and middle ground of Rajkowska’s photographs. Mysterious light, picturesque – would a Rembrandt have painted the today’s cityscape as if it was a portrait of an ageing lady?

Joanna Rajkowska (*1968 in Bydgoszcz, Poland) is known for her projects in the public space, objects, films, installations and interventions. The phantasmagoric installation ‘Sumpfstadt’ shows three photographs of the Berlin location where the old palace once stood. What breaks up the fast observation of the exhibition is a photographic wallpaper on the opposite wall, as well as a text projected on a wall. It is written by the artist herself.

Berlin as a swampland. Rotten, dirty and full of road works – the often-cited charm of this city. Should I think of Berlin drowning in the finance crisis? ‘Poor but sexy’, was mentioned once by a well-known personality of the city. Or are Rajkowska’s works rather a neo-hippiesque link to the fact that everything that we know today – huge buildings, fast streets, the never sleeping party city Berlin – is temporary and in the end gets beaten by nature? In that sense the human race gets older and can’t triumph over mother nature.

Evolution. I remember the biological research drive of my childhood when I observed a mud on protozoons, common duckweed or tadpoles. Is Berlin’s face such an evolutionary mud? A metaphor for the true essence of life?

“The artist creates places which have to be left and abandoned to its fate”,

is written in the exhibition catalogue. Rajkowska’s projects rely on historically and ideologically burdened places that don’t have an identity anymore or can be associated with traumata and repression. The Berlin palace as a trauma? After getting damaged bitter during II WW, knocked down and replaced by the well known Palast der Rebublik in 1950 it finally will be build up again – on the old walls from the past.

The exhibition ‘Sumpfstadt’ constructs or degrades a monument which arises out of the reduction of needless elements. While the artist reclaims the primary organic forms she de-historicises an important monument and simultaneously unfolds the intense try to proof a nation’s identity.

What is left for me to say is to refer to the old Slavic root ‘berl’ which some people consider to be the etymologic origin of the word ‘Berlin':

it means ‘marsh’.

Those who want to know more about Rajkowska and her works should visit the exhibition ‘Sumpfstadt’ which still runs until August 31st 2012 in the Polnisches Institut, Berlin. From  April 28th until  June 16th 2012 the Galerie ZAK | BRANICKA shows ‘Born in Berlin – A Letter to Rosa’. From April 27th –  July 1st 2012 Rajkowska can also be seen in the exhibitions ‘Born in Berlin’ and ‘Final Fantasies’ in the Akademie der Künste.