''Nahtstelle'' - Oscar Lebeck

Two mirror installations stand opposite each other on either side of the former inner-German border, each slightly angled toward the viewer. In their reflective surfaces, the structural remnants of the border installations appear: watchtowers, fences, and barrier elements that once marked division. Through their precise alignment, a visual connection between both sides is created. Just a few kilometers from Schöningen, the inner-German border once ran between the former FRG and GDR along the barrier system toward Hötensleben. This section is one of the few remaining parts of the GDR border fortifications, which were systematically built until 1989 in front of villages lying directly along the border. The 350-meter-long “protective strip” of walls, metal mesh fences, signal wires, minefields, and watchtowers has been a listed monument since 1990. The mirrors both address and bridge spatial distance — each reflecting the other. These temporary installations complete one another; their full effect unfolds only in dialogue. They make visible what once was while simultaneously creating a new conversation — between East and West, between memory and the present.

*''Nahtstelle'' - a seam, the place where two separate pieces are joined together.

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Oscar Lebeck, born in Hamburg in 1993, studied at the Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts and completed the postgraduate master’s program Art in Context at the Berlin University of the Arts. His artistic practice engages with the ways in which traces of history can be represented and made visible; for example, he reconstructed the cult spaces of ancient temple sites for a solo exhibition at the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig. With his work, he explores the perception of places steeped in history and encourages reflection on the versatility of the representation of structural relics. In 2021, he received a travel grant from the Saxony Cultural Foundation to the Goethe Institute in Hanoi and in 2023 he was a fellow at the Künstlerhaus Edenkoben.

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Artistic interventions are part of the Creative Europe project ''(In)Visible Traces. Artistic memories of the Cold War''. Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.