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The neoclassical Neue Wache - New Guardhouse - stands on the Unter den Linden. It was built in 1818 by Karl Friedrich Schinkel and a century later became a memorial to the war-fallen, a role it held in altering ways through the Weimar, Nazi and Communist eras. Today, it is the Federal Republics Memorial to the Victims of War and Tyranny, housing Käthe Kollwitzs sculpture of a mother mourning her dead son. Two aspects link it to Maria Kulikovskas recent performance 254 at the Neue Nationalgalerie. First, their shared aim to remind us of suffering. Second, their formal structure, which relates sculptural bodies to architectural settings. Their differences, however, are instructive.
Kulikovska first enacted 254 in July 2014, in protest against the Russian annexation of Crimea, her home, and the destruction of her works in Donetsk by the pro-Russian militia. Looting the Isolatsia gallery, they dragged out the statues she had cast of her own body in soap and, aiming their guns, shot them to pulp. Kulikovska was to have taken part in Manifesta 2014s St Petersburg Biennale, but after Crimea and Donetsk, she refused. Instead, she went to the Hermitage Annex (once the Russian army HQ), where, wrapped in a Ukraine flag, she lay down on the grand stairway, like a corpse beneath a shroud. She was arrested and narrowly avoided trial, and was banned from Crimea. Later, from her number as a refugee, she called her action 254, translating her spontaneous protest into the invited performance that she enacted each day for a week on the steps of the Neue Nationalgalerie. Thus, the Neue Wache and the Neue Nationalgalerie both became, in quite different ways, sites of commemoration.
All who know Berlin know the laconic pavilion of the Nationalgalerie, reopened now after David Chipperfields restoration of Mies van der Rohes 1965 building. Set amid a divided city bereft of place and centre, it presented an existential counter to the desolation around it: an implacable grid within a canopy of cantilevered steel, visibly extending beyond walls of glass. Yet this monumental vitrine would not be for exhibiting the permanent collection, which was in the basement; it was to be what Germans call a Kunsthalle - a venue for temporary exhibitions. Its open plan of...