35 internatinal artists on four floors with more than 4,000 qm of industrial ruins
Daniel García Andújar-Siegrun Appelt-John M. Armleder-Peter Bogers-Marie Jose Burki-Diller + Scofidio-Onno Dirker-Stan Douglas-Christoph Draeger-FLATZ-Mark Formanek-Rodney Graham-Johan Grimonprez-ipfo-Christoph Irrgang-Gerald van der Kaap-Kirsten Kaiser-Leuchtstoff-Peter Land-Antoni Muntadas-Walter Niedermayr-Vito Orazem-Tony Oursler-Jose Alejandro Restrepo-Alberto Simon-Jan-Peter ER. Sonntag-Bill Spinhoven-Allan Wexler-Andrea Wolfensberger-Thomas Wrede

An introduction
Zones of Desire are sites that stage what is considered to be long lost: worlds of artificial experience, perfect machines of illusion, but also the private retreats of the individual.
Today sees the ubiquitous creation of infrastructures that make life more acceptable – the artificial adventure playgrounds of fun parks, the shopping malls of new consumer culture, zoological gardens as oases of nature, travelling to exotic worlds, but also catastrophes processed by a TV culture that ensures that the sublime shudder is experienced from a safedistance.
The exhibition Zones of Desire confronts these scenarios and deals with artistic approaches to the topographies of staged desire, somewhere between Easy Living and failed utopias. Derelict for four years, the Union-Brewery in the center of Dortmund is an ideal non-site for the project. On four floors with more than 4,000 m2 of industrial ruin, 35 international artists present video works, installations and photographs, dealing with the spaces and projections of the post-industrial era. The starting point of the exhibition was one of the desolate floors in the former brewery building. In its original state, the floor presented a panorama of ruins turned into an interior space. Amidst the debris of this inverted landscape, a green lawn was installed as central motive for the modern reservation.

Visitors enter the exhibition through the specially designed Café Matta-Clark. Passing by the space-engulfing video-installations along the entrance corridor, the visitors reach the elevator where they are received by lift operators. Moving from floor to floor, they enter various sections of the exhibition, each with its own
specific form and contents. The infrastructure of the exhibition, installed for six weeks only, is decidedly provisional. Simulating the fun park as well as the bel étage of the museum, it nevertheless modifies both these presentational orders, so that the presentation turns the site itself into a work on show.

Place: The Dortmunder U

The central building of the former brewery Union Brauerei, built in 1926/27, with the company’s logo – a long drawn-out Neon-U – on the roof, is commonly known as the Dortmunder U. Entering the U today one meets with an impressive sight: torn out walls, rubble and broken pieces next to fanciful tiles and well-known industrial romanticism. Undamaged rooms adjoin desolate ones, and often one encounters peculiar details such as the word RECIPIENT on a control panel. Highlight is undoubtedly the tower storey with its vaults, galleries and a spiral staircase of steel leading straight under the U itself.

Concept

The exhibition uses four storeys of the building that can be reached by elevator, taking the visitors to extremely diverse situations; from a landscape (of ruins) reversed to the interior to the almost religious feeling of the tower storey. The rooms will mainly be left in their individual state: it is not intended to implant a museum.

The invited artists show photographs, video- and site specific-installations, that balance collective and most intimate zones of desire in an ambivalence of affirmation and negation.
The exhibition concept is structured from two directions: on the one hand it argues with the place as an urban non-place, which is being declared a temporary display for contemporary art. On the other hand it focusses on approaches in
contemporary art that go beyond art-inherent questions and concern themselves with the displays of what is real.
The aim is an interaction between the place and the artworks placed in it.
Curated by: Iris Dressler, Hans Dieter Christ
hARTware projekte e. V.
c/o Sunderweg 1
D-44147 Dortmund
++49(0)231-823106 fax ++49(0)231-8820240
–> Finishing 4th October

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Im Rahmen der Ausstellung “Reservate der Sehnsucht” in der ehemaligen Union Brauerei wurde die von Daniel García Andùjar entdeckte Fotosammlung der einstigen Brauereiangestellten Wilhelm und Manfred Beutel präsentiert. Die Sammlung dokumentiert historische Ereignisse aus Dortmund, die im öffentlichen Bewusstsein der Stadt heute nur wenig präsent sind: die Jahre des deutschen Faschismus sowie die fast vollständige Zerstörung der Innenstadt während des Zweiten Weltkrieges.

Der wesentliche Beitrag von Andújar bei der Präsentation der Sammlung bestand in einem eigens entwickelten geografischen Informationssystem, kurz GIS, mit dem sich von jedem einzelnen Bild der exakte Zeitpunkt der Aufnahme sowie der Standort des Fotografen ermitteln lässt.

Auf jeder Fotografie erscheint die Union Brauerei an einem falschen Ort: Sie wurde jeweils leicht verschoben, deplaziert. Wilhelm und Manfred Beutel sind zwar keine fiktiven Personen, haben jedoch nie in der Union Brauerei gearbeitet. Tatsache ist vielmehr, dass der Widerständler Wilhelm Beutel in Dortmund von den Nazis umgebracht wurde. Andújar hat sich während eines Stipendiums in Dortmund eingehend mit der Nazi-Vergangenheit dieser Stadt beschäftigt und deren Abwesenheit im öffentlichen Raum bemerkt: Kein Platz, keine Straße, die etwa nach dem Widerständler Wilhelm Beutel benannt wäre… In diesem Sinne ist die Präsentation der angeblichen Fotosammlung nicht in erster Linie ein “Fake”, sondern eine Hommage an Wilhelm Beutel sowie eine Revision der Dortmunder Stadtgeschichte, die jenseits der schicken Simulationen durch GIS liegt.

Iris Dressler

Daniel García Andújar: The Manfred and Wilhelm Beutel Photo Collection, 1998

Daniel García Andújar: The Manfred and Wilhelm Beutel Photo Collection, 1998

Daniel García Andújar: The Manfred and Wilhelm Beutel Photo Collection, 1998

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Daniel García Andújar: The Manfred and Wilhelm Beutel Photo Collection, 1998
CD-ROM, 50 framed digital prints
Coproduction: Hartware MedienKunstVerein
Reservate der Sehnsucht, Dortmunder U, 1998

In the course of the “Reservate der Sehnsucht” exhibition in the former Union brewery, Daniel García Andùjar presented a photograph collection he discovered. Compiled by the former brewery workers Wilhelm and Manfred Beutel, the collection documents episodes in the history of Dortmund which scarcely figure in the city’s contemporary public awareness: the years during the Third Reich, and the almost total destruction of the inner city during World War II.

Andújar’s main contribution to this presentation was a specially developed geographical information system (GIS) enabling the exact time of shooting, as well as the location of the photographer, to be determined for each picture.

The Union brewery appears in the wrong place on every photograph, having been slightly displaced each time. Although Wilhelm and Manfred Beutel are not fictional characters, they were never employed by the brewery. Wilhelm Beutel was a member of the resistance movement, and was murdered by the Nazis in Dortmund. While on a fellowship in Dortmund, Andújar intensively studied the city’s Nazi past, and was struck by the period’s absence from public space – no square or street, for instance, has been named after Wilhem Beutel in honour to the role he played. In this sense, the purported photo collection is presented less as a faked chronicle than as an homage to Wilhelm Beutel and an attempt to amend Dortmund’s public version of the authentic history lying outside the smart GIS simulations.

Iris Dressler

Daniel García Andújar: The Manfred and Wilhelm Beutel Photo Collection, 1998

Daniel García Andújar: The Manfred and Wilhelm Beutel Photo Collection, 1998

Dortmunder U

Built 1926-27, the brewing house and depot of the Union brewery was Dortmund’s first high-rise building. Like the Zollern colliery or the former Phoenix steelworks, the Dortmunder U is a symbol of the era of the mining industry in the Ruhr Valley. Beer – the “fuel of industry” – was brewed in the striking edifice up to 1994. The building’s popular name comes from a 9-metre high illuminated “U” installed on its roof in 1962. This landmark immediately catches visitors’ eyes as they alight at the railway station.

“Reservate der Sehnsucht” was the title of a spectacular media-art exhibition that was mounted in the Dortmunder U in 1998 and marked the building’s incipient transition from a ruined factory site to a venue of arts and culture. Work is currently underway on a project to refurbish the Dortmunder U as a museum.

Exhibitions

Reservate der Sehnsucht 1998
The exhibition “Reservate der Sehnsucht” dealt with those places in which individual and collective desires meet with fulfilment – or, equally, disappointment. Potential locations could be anything from themed shopping malls to exotic adventure parks.

“The subject is the commercial re-casting of urban, rural and social fabrics, and likewise the individual strategies for life and survival on the fringes of public and private” (Iris Dressler). The artists – among them Daniel García Andújar, Christoph Draeger und Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag – invited to exhibit by the curators Iris Dressler and Hans Christ adopted very diverse artistic strategies in their handling of these interrelated themes.

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