Barbara Kruger: Bitte Lachen / Please Cry

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The Neue Nationalgalerie presents Barbara Kruger's first institutional solo exhibition in Berlin. The American conceptual artist has developed a site-specific text installation for the Neue Nationalgalerie’s upper-level exhibition hall, making use of the entire space. The work seeks to engage visitors in public discussion about political and social topics.

In an expansive text installation, Barbara Kruger combines her own texts with quotes by three authors ‒ George Orwell, James Baldwin and Walter Benjamin ‒ whose writings each address major political issues: the violence of totalitarian states, the mechanisms behind societal discrimination and the dangers of biased historiography.

Through the stark graphic impact of her texts, reduced to just three colours (black, white and red), Kruger succeeds in introducing her own artistic language into Mies van der Rohe’s massive building. Aside from the topicality of the texts and their subject matter, the invitation extended to Barbara Kruger to develop this work also pays homage to her outstanding artistic contributions, whose feminist and political approaches have strongly influenced the art of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.