Curatorial Statement

An empty building could mean freedom. Or the loss of a job. Property. A place of fear. A space of possibility. A rave. A new beginning.

What the years surrounding the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification meant depended on who experienced them, from where, and under what conditions. Social structures dissolved, property relations shifted, and spaces lost their former functions and were occupied anew. What had once been familiar disappeared, while new possibilities emerged. In East Germany, 1989 also marked a transformation that reached into almost every aspect of life.

Tanzflächen der Wiedervereinigung looks at this period through the places where social change was directly experienced and actively shaped: temporary dance floors, clubs, youth clubs, squatted buildings, and self-organised spaces in Berlin and East Germany.

We understand 1989 as a political rupture, but not as a cultural starting point. Scenes, networks, friendships, and forms of self-organisation already existed in both East and West Germany and encountered fundamentally changed conditions after the fall of the Wall. Existing structures disappeared, new spaces of possibility emerged, people appropriated spaces, developed new cultural practices, and explored different forms of community.

The defining stories of new beginnings, temporary spaces, and Berlin’s emerging club and techno culture are part of this history. At the same time, many other realities existed: in smaller cities and rural areas across East Germany, in punk and hip-hop scenes, youth cultures and subcultures, and in queer, migrant, and Black communities. Not everyone experienced the new freedoms in the same way. New beginnings and loss, euphoria and uncertainty, appropriation and displacement, freedom, far-right violence, and exclusion existed side by side.

This simultaneity and multiplicity of voices form the curatorial starting point of the exhibition.

For this reason, Tanzflächen der Wiedervereinigung does not attempt to bring different experiences together into a single, linear narrative. Personal memories sit alongside historical documents, individual biographies alongside broader social transformations. Stories can complement, overlap, and contradict one another. Gaps are part of this history too: what was never documented, what has been lost, and what has rarely been considered part of this story.

History, after all, is shaped not only by what happened. It is also shaped by what is remembered, preserved, and passed on. Which images shape our understanding of a time? Which places are remembered? Which experiences become part of collective memory, and which remain at its margins?

The dance floor is our starting point, but not our limit.

Clubs, youth clubs, squatted buildings, and temporary spaces were more than places for music. They were spaces of encounter and self-organisation, where communities formed, belonging was negotiated, spaces were appropriated, and new rules and ways of living were explored. At the same time, these spaces were also shaped by social power structures, conflicts, and exclusion.

Here, we see their significance as spaces of social and democratic negotiation: not because these spaces were automatically free or democratic, but because they make tangible the questions of who gets to shape spaces, who has access, who belongs, and who gets to decide.

These questions continue into the present. Whose reunification? Who owns space? Who gets to shape cities and culture? What freedoms emerge in times of social upheaval? Which stories remain, and which disappear? How are these stories told, and by whom? And whose memories become part of our shared history?

Tanzflächen der Wiedervereinigung therefore does not tell the one story of reunification. It tells many. At the same time.