Dresdner Zimmer (2000)

The Dresden Room was realized as a counterpart of the Frankfurt Room. In 2000, the Öztürks visited the former East Germany for the first time. They came across places that seemed perfectly compatible with the image they had in their mind of the East. Just as the two artists conceived of Turkey as a ‚black-and-white‘ country because of the black-and-white photographs hanging in their grandparents‘ homes, they also believed that East Germany was a grey, bleak and faded country in which the sun never shone. Their perception of (life in) the East was ultimately the product of images they had seen as children in Czech or Polish movies. The Dresden Room contains furniture – an armchair, a sofa, a table and sideboard – made of cardboard, fabric and self-adhesive imitation-wood-grain plastic veneer. Stills taken from famous DEFA movies (the Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft was the East German state’s official film studio) hang on the walls. In both the Frankfurt Room and the Dresden Room, the Öztürks contrasts their memories of a Turkish childhood with their views of childhood in East Germany, and in both cases they fall back on the clichéd images that underlie their view of the two cultures.

Barbara Steiner