“The Other Side of Here” brings together works by Katharina Gaenssler (born in 1974 in Munich) and Carsten Fock (born in 1968 in Weida) in a dialogue about freedom, flight, memory, and community.
Katharina Gaenssler is exhibiting her work “UP!” for the first time in Munich—a six-meter-tall colorful balloon that commemorates the escape of the Strelzyk and Wetzel families from the GDR in 1979. Developed for the House of Bavarian History in Regensburg and set to be presented at the MINSK in Potsdam in 2025, the balloon has become a symbol of democracy, freedom, and collective self-empowerment.
Carsten Fock, who grew up in the GDR and fled to West Germany in 1988 before the fall of the Berlin Wall, presents a juxtaposition of early felt-tip pen drawings from the series “1939 1987 1989 2002 – ALL YOU CAN EAT” (2002), in which personal experience, political order, and collective memory intertwine. In her series “Bauhaus Staircase,” created in 2015 for the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, Katharina Gaenssler brings together architecture, art history, and cultural memory. This is complemented by Fock’s landscape paintings, which characterize his later work and can be interpreted as a meditation on freedom, borders, and the political dimension of landscape.
The exhibition brings together historical and biographical perspectives on the history of the GDR and opens a dialogue about freedom and democracy, their social prerequisites, and questions of conformity, resistance, and belonging. It marks the beginning of a long-term collaboration between Katharina Gaenssler and the gallery.
