Since World War II, Berlin has been an architectural playground, a vast concrete experiment driven by competing ideological visions.
For the last 60 years, Michael Ruetz has been meticulously documenting that evolving landscape, but as the city changed, the positions of his camera have not. Documentary videos reveal his painstaking efforts to find the exact same spot to set up his tripod – often to the consternation of locals.
In the centre of this absorbing large-format photography exhibition, they’ve constructed a room in a room, showing the four directional views of Schlossplatz, taken at roughly five-year intervals. Gleaming in the sun like an enormous bar of gold bullion, the Palast der Republik maintains its prominent position until it dissolves into nothing, to be replaced by the brutal concrete shell of the Humboldt Forum.
Berlin becomes a shifting, mutating organism in the hands of Ruetz, with the exhibition capturing a strange irony: that its landscape of bricks and mortar will long outlast the human beings who created it (although in Berlin that’s perhaps not a given).
A tech-head’s dream with shelves of archival documentation and vitrines of camera equipment, the exhibition balances the laboriousness of its processes with the fascinating insight of a sophisticated ‘before and after’. ★★★
- Akademie der Künste, Pariser Platz 4, Mitte, ‘Poesie der Zeit. Michael Ruetz – Timescapes 1966-2023’, through Aug 4, details.
