SIDES Berlin

This most recent series of works, "SIDES Berlin", uses the architectural plans and sections of buildings in Berlin, Germany that were lived in by Jews in the 1930s. I began this series with my father's childhood home on Altonaer Strasse where he lived until 1938, when he and his immediate family escaped to London. I was awarded a McCloy Fellowship in Art in support of this project and I returned to Berlin in 2009 to expand the work to include buildings once lived in by other Berlin Jews — among them, the former family homes of Anni and Josef Albers, Mike Nichols, Peter Gay, Else Ury, Walter Benjamin and other relatives and once-Berliners I have discovered through my research. This Berlin work addresses identity, loss and place. My intention is to contribute to the record of shared experience; to create work that recognizes the loss of property, both as historical fact and as a more universal metaphor for the psychological trauma of displacement.

The Altonaer series is comprised of two parts: in the first, the building’s plans, sections and elevations are abstracted and represented in gouache paintings; in the second, canvas strands (acquired by deconstructing painting canvases) are used to sew the abstracted architectural shapes onto large sheets of black paper.

The works using the floor plans of the homes of my relatives and other former Berlin Jews are gouache on vintage paper.