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»WIEN. DIE PERLE DES REICHES«
Architekturzentrum Wien
Exhibition catalogue
Vienna, 2014

Why pink?
A photograph from 1946 is the reference point for an exhibition design in 2015. The photograph shows the installation of the exhibition “Never Forget! An Antifascist Exhibition”, and was taken at the Künstlerhaus Wien in 1946. Our design concept for the Architekturzentrum Wien (Az W), for an exhibition to be shown for the first time of the Klaus Steiner Archive, currently being processed, is based on this moment of installation in 1946. We are producinga re-enactment of an unfinished situation. Seven decades after the end of the Nazi regime, a start is only now being made to process the history of urban and spatial planning in Nazi Vienna, so too the history of the lack of awareness of the depth of architecture’s involvement with Nazism, as well as of visible, and invisible, continuities in urban planning and development. The history of violence that many of these plans result into—“Aryanisation”, forced labour, expulsion and organised mass murder—is not captured in the original documents on display. This, too, is behind the “reconstruction” of an unfinished moment: unfinished—and yet still clearly with a distinctive positioning of the elements. The walls of the 1946 exhibition “Never Forget!” were definitely not painted pink; yet, we use this colour because it would have been anathema to the Nazis, and counteracts the sense of appropriation into the present time. An exhibition of first allusions in mid-installation. Precision in the preliminary.
Gabu Heindl, Toledo i Dertschei

see: Catalog