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“Markt” Wolfgang Tillmans Tillmans’s photograph series of “Markt” was created in 1989, when the artist was living in Berlin for a couple of months during his studies. They are exhibited here, enlarged for the first time, and they already foretell subjects and formal characteristics of his later works, such as society, still life and a top views. As photographs of the Polish market, they are evidence of a personal, contradictory curiosity about the events, as well as historical documents of a Berlin legend and of an ambiguous chapter in the relationship between Germany and Poland. After immigration regulations had been relaxed in 1988, thousands of Poles were selling goods and food at Reichpietschufer not far from the Potsdamer Platz, by January/February 1989. With the reunification, this market was given another fresh impetus. The press was resentfully charging it with “dirt and stench,” or praising it as a tourist attraction – “unique in the centre of Europe” – and for the opportunities for making good bargains it provided – “genuine rock-crystal”. Apart from its size, the “Polish market” was characterized by a varied history of prohibition, enclosure and exclusion. In the end, the police and the judiciary proceeded – with summary judgements, arrests and denials of entry permits – against the traders, who were promptly stigmatised as “illegal”. Tillmans’s close-ups are especially indicative of his own astonishment in view of these objects. In the eyes of “westerners” they were not necessarily recognizable as goods, however they were meant to be sold by people who had undertaken long travels. In this respect, the photographs also show a leftist distancing from market and materialism, popular at the time before the reunification, which is confronted with the existential situation of the dealers and their desire to make money at any cost. “Markt” is the document of an economically extraordinary situation for Poles as well as for Berliners, which was based on individual initiatives and an, as yet, unregulated stream of goods at the time of the collapse of the blocs. Artist, born 1968, lives and works in London. |
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