The German Autumn in Minor Spaces
Allen Ball & Kimberly Mair

This project maps out the visible and invisible traces, marks, and scars that remain on the surfaces of the urban landscape from the events leading up to the so-called German Autumn of 1977, a period of state crisis and the implementation of extreme security measures that followed three significant occurrences in October 1977: the failed hijacking of a Lufthansa flight carried out by German guerrilla fighters with the assistance of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; the deaths of three core members of the Red Army Faction imprisoned at Stuttgart-Stammheim; and the murder of RAF hostage and then chair of the German Federation of Industry, Hanns Martin Schleyer.

Capturing mostly unmarked and seemingly negligible sites in three German cities: Berlin, Kassel, and Stuttgart, the underlying assumption of The German Autumn in Minor Spaces is that consciousness is established in the reiterative meetings of body and built environment, acknowledging that one’s experience of a space is shaped not only by personal biography but by collective cultural instruction.

Eighteen 48”x32” photographs on aluminum panels and a digital LCD picture frame encased in a red star, document and reiterate the sites of shootouts, breakouts, and hideouts––events that occurred in what Ball and Mair are calling minor spaces within the otherwise vastness of the industrialized and highly policed cities in the context of coordinated counter-terrorist measures.

February 19 to March 21, 2009
Opening Reception: February 26, 7–10pm
Artists in attendance

gallery   Nate Larson   Karen Hibbard