Current Exhibition:

Anita Di Bianco
The Displaced Person
14 January - 3 March, 2012

We are proud to announce Anita Di Bianco's (*1970) first solo exhibition at SCHAU ORT.

The video at the center of Anita Di Bianco’s exhibition The Displaced Person at SCHAU ORT gallery concerns itself with a very particular protagonist of historical [and geographical] juxtapositioning. The Ballhaus Berlin stands as the sole remainder of early 20th century “Tanzpaläste” in the Chaussestrasse. By the 1920s a section of this northern continuation of the Friedrichstrasse was already was known as something of a “Vergnügungsmeile”. An accumulation of interior detail and a conspicuously additive tendency in the layering of current dance-hall fashions having left in their wake a sort of twilight-nightclub dystopia to which human beings might seem superfluous, hopelessly stuck in the wrong time, which is to say nostalgic for any period. The 44 original “Tischtelefone” (circa 1930) function as temperamentally as they might have when the hall re-opened in the early 1950s – when approaching a stranger for a dance at such a mechanical remove might have more aptly coincided with certain expectations of festive demeanor.

Of equal weight geographically is the new “BND / Bundesnachrichtdienst” [German Federal Intelligence Service] headquarters under construction approximately 100 meters directly to the north of the Ballhaus, on the site of the former “Stadion der Weltjugend” [Stadium of the World Youth]; a 260,000 square meter complex “where up to 4,000 BND staff members will be working as from 2013.” It can be supposed that at least one or two of those 4,000 staff members will find themselves sweeping up Monday morning, perhaps mirroring the movements of Herr Wernicke, just across the Habersaathstraße, after the weekend at the Ballhaus Berlin.

More information on Anita Di Bianco HERE.

Camera: Claire Pijman
Text: Anita Di Bianco
Translations: Christoph Kölle and Loreto Solis Germani
Performers: Cristina Gomez Barrio and Wolfgang Mayer (Discoteca Flaming Star)
Edit: Sebastian Bodirsky
Production assistance: Kristina Rabe
Special thanks: Herr Wernicke - Ballhaus Berlin and Giovanni Frazzetto