The Zion Church building stands like a towering ship in the middle of Prenzlauer Berg. It provides a temporary venue for the exhibition “Points of Resistance”, in which 55 artists are able, despite the pandemic, to present new works. The Zion Church has become a kind of ark for art. In this sense, art comes back to its origins in the nave of the church, for art first emerged from the activities of religious cults. On the other hand, we might also recall Hegel’s “Phenomenology of the Spirit”, which states that the “real spirit” only acquired its consciousness of “absolute being” in the phase of the “religion of art”, thereby finding its true self. Whether in cult or in philosophy, art and the church have been interlocked with one another again and again throughout history, sometimes in harmony, sometimes in fierce antagonism.

Due to its “absolute” position, art repeatedly finds itself in the role of opposition. And yet, throughout most of its history, the rooms of the Zion Church have also been open to “free” spirits in particular. Social questions, too, have been vehemently debated here, right in the middle of a major societal hotspot. Right from the beginning, the Zion Church has been a place for the socially deprived. Consequently, the parish repeatedly became a flashpoint of resistance to violence and persecution. The building was inaugurated in 1873; it stood in the middle of a district that had developed very quickly and became densely populated during industrialisation. It was home to the proletariat. Numerous social aid programmes were initiated here by the Church.

In 1931, for one-and-a-half years, the young theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer took over the teaching of confirmation classes for the Protestant parish. He immediately denounced the social evils and practised his counter-concept of the “Church for others”. As part of this, he fought, in particular, for the support of the Church in his acrimonious battle against the “Aryan paragraph” and wrote, inter alia: “The Church has an unconditional responsibility towards any social order, even if this is not part of the Christian community.” And consequently: “The Church must not only bandage up those victims crushed by the wheel but also jam the spokes of the wheel itself.” From around 1938, Bonhoeffer was part of the resistance movement. He was executed in 1945.

During the 12 years of Nazi rule, the resistance network “Rote Kapelle” had a number of secret meeting points not far from the Zion Church. Here, they illegally printed flyers, helped Jews and members of the opposition, and documented – as far as possible – the crimes of the Nazi regime. Several individuals from this activist group were executed in 1942/43. Some of these came from artists’ circles, e.g. the sculptor Kurt Schumacher and his wife Elisabeth, a painter and graphic artist, and the young Dutch woman Cato Bontjes van Beek from the Worpswede/Fischerhude artists’ colony; these people had printed and distributed illegal writings and leaflets calling for resistance to the Nazis.

The emergence of the peace movement in the GDR at the end of the 1970s strengthened the forces of resistance there. The young group “Die Umwelt-Bibliothek (UB)” [The Environment Library] was founded in the cellar rooms of the vicarage under the protection of the Protestant Zion Church in the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. This group took a stand in matters of peace and environmental policies, discussed taboo subjects, increased access to critical literature, and published a magazine with a small print run. The group very soon raised the suspicions of the government.

Thus, the Zion Church was repeatedly witness to acts of courage and desperation within its neo-Gothic walls, just as, in our exhibition, the “Burden Bear”, a sandstone sculpture by Stefan Rinck, constantly carries a building brick on its back. This sculpture became a logo for the exhibition and, if possible, it ought to remain in the Berlin environs as a memorial in a larger format.

The large number of artists participating in this exhibition is, in itself, a demonstration. It counteracts the extensive loss of presentation opportunities as a result of the pandemic, creating, furthermore, a counter-model to the threat of art fading into pure digitality. As an exhibition space, the nave is also an antithesis to the pure aesthetic of the “white cube”, instead embedding art in traces of life and experience. Even highly aesthetic works are always in correspondence with, and interdependent on, a real societal environment. Let us mention some examples from our exhibition here.

Günther Uecker’s sculpture “Kunstpranger” [Art Pillory], 2008, with a large capsized tree trunk, is a work of reduced, “meagre” aesthetics. The trunk, placed upright, which seems here to be demonstratively rising up again, is also a definitive protest against environmental destruction and forest decline. This work is preceded by multi-part ensembles of “nail forest” works in Uecker’s work since 1984. On top of the trunk in this work sits an aggressively splayed nail formation recalling a crown of thorns, like a gaping wound in nature.

Otto Piene’s lithographic sheet “Der bemooste Stein” [The Mossy Stone], with its grimly laughing death’s head from the portfolio “Die Gärten des Heliogabalus” [The Gardens of Heliogabalus], 2014, is the artist’s final work. The ten sheets amount to a kind of totality of life. The paradisiacal, the peace symbol and the grotesque – indeed, the demonic – form theses and antitheses, interpenetrating one another. The head of the Medusa, whose gaze turns the viewer to stone, winks at us in the form of a death’s head. In other sheets, for example, sharks are crucified sacrilegiously in poisoned green water; red, blood-smeared arms extend out of the water: are they calling for revolution and resistance? This is life in all its antagonisms.

Bill Viola’s video-sound installation “The Raft”, 2004, symbolises the borderland between the conscious and the unconscious. Violent floods are washing over a group of people from a range of backgrounds. The individual reactions to the deluge are shown in extreme slow motion. According to Viola, the work is about annihilation or survival, threat, hope, demise or possible redemption. The final image is one of misery. The archetype for this was the famous painting “The Raft of the Medusa” by Théodore Rousseau, 1819.

Numerous other works in “Points of Resistance” reflect lived lives, tragedy and rebellion, too. David Krippendorff’s drawing “Burning Atlanta”, with its burning houses, is borrowed from the film “Gone With the Wind”, Hollywood 1938, and remains highly topical in its denunciation of violence. The film is also closely connected to David Krippendorff’s new film, which likewise picks up again on an event from 1938 – the performance ban on the black opera singer Marion Anderson in Washington, D.C..

“1938” is also the title of a painting for the exhibition by Kerstin Serz. It depicts Sophie Scholl, a member of the “White Rose” resistance group, on an early photo from this very year. All around her is a blooming wreath with the “flowers of resistance”. It recalls the courage and honesty of Sophie Scholl, whose fight against the Nazi dictatorship has recently, on numerous occasions, been approved by the wrong side. On 18 February 1943, brother and sister Hans and Sophie Scholl threw a pile of flyers – the sixth ones they had printed – calling for resistance among fellow students, from the gallery on the second floor down into the atrium of the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich. They were then denounced, arrested and executed.

In her painting, “Leviathan”, 2020, Franziska Klotz thematises one of the most important works in the modern theory of the state: in his statements on the necessity of a social contract (1651), the deeply sceptical Thomas Hobbes assumes that man is, and remains, a wolf to man: “Homo homini lupus”; by nature, there prevails a “war of every man against every man”. Such an excess of power and violence is presented in the painting in complex ways with the blood and fire of a battle scene.

Manfred Peckl expands the optics once again, showing three examples from his sculpture group “Skyamonds”, 2008, which comprehends the destruction of the world as an event coming from the sky. In the process, matter and anti-matter are melted together into a large lump of fibreglass. These dark, misshapen sculptural bodies are sometimes placed in collage with fragments of star charts.

Finally, Maik Schierloh’s broad colour score at first seems to be wholly detached from reality, but it is actually closely related to the nave of the Zion Church, specifically to the great organ. Since its destruction, of course, the organ gallery has been empty. Maik Schierloh, originally an organ builder, gives the instrument a colourful presence in painterly metaphor. A memento. And a utopia!

– Stephan von Wiese