Echoes of the Brother Countries

How do the transnational solidarities of the GDR shape our present? Echoes of the Brother Countries explores visions and illusions.

Between 1949 and 1990, thousands migrated to German Democratic Republic (GDR) from countries such as Algeria, Angola, Chile, Cuba, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Syria, and Vietnam. To this day their stories remain largely untold. The exhibition and research project Echoes of the Brother Countries is dedicated to the often overlooked political, economic, educational, and artistic links, as well as the exchange and migration between the GDR and other socialist-orientated states, the so-called brother countries.

In the shadow of the iconographic depictions of solidarity such as a “united class struggle,” or “socialist internationalism,” there were other realities. Despite the GDR’s emphasis on fair labor conditions and professional development, migrants experienced labor exploitation, cramped living quarters, surveillance, curtailment of certain freedoms such as being in a relationship or starting a family, racist and xenophobic attacks, withheld wages, and broken promises by the GDR and their own governments.

However, there were also practices of solidarity across individual, local, national, and global scales, including GDR support for “anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, and liberation struggles” in other parts of the world. How were these relations made possible? And how much of this history and its legacies remain visible today?

The exhibition and research project brings together numerous positions that create a common space for remembrance, dialogue, and reflection on transnational solidarities and contradictions. With an extensive opening and public program, Echoes of the Brother Countries explores the question of how these interwoven histories continue to shape the former brother countries to this day, especially the lives of the people who migrated under the conditions of these alliances.

The multidisciplinary project critically maps GDR history and relations with its brother countries, a term that is critically taken up for its gendered problematics, and illusions of and allusions to equality. Amid erasures, gaps, and absences in broader public and educational discourses, the project attempts to understand the reverberations of those histories in Germany as well as in the former brother countries, and to situate these relations as part of a global history of cultural movement and exchange.

With contributions by: Abed Abdi, Khaled Abdulwahed, Donald Acquaye, Maimuna Adam, Kais al-Zubaidi, Santos Chávez, Ivan Cibulka, Sarah Ama Duah, Nguyễn Lương Đức, Ângela Ferreira, Carla Filipe, Lea Grundig, Sami Hakki, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Isaac-Newton-Schule, Emile Itolo, Januário Jano, Hiwa K, Euridice Zaituna Kala, Martha Ketsela, Songhak Ky, Verena Kyselka, Heinz-Karl Kummer, Hernando León, Humberto López, MORUS-Oberschule, Nástio Mosquito, Olu Oguibe, César Olhagaray, Zohra Opoku, Charles Owusu, Minh Duc Pham, Gertraude Pohl, Elske Rosenfeld, Riad Ali Saad, Farkhondeh Shahroudi, Sophie-Brahe-Gemeinschaftsschule, Dito Tembe, Sung Tieu, Christoph Wetzel, and Horst Weber, among others.

On the weekend of March 1–3, HKW opens Echoes of the Brother Countries with a series of panels, performances and interventions, concerts, DJ sets, film screenings, conversations, exhibitions walks, a karaoke night, and a children’s discotheque.

For more information on the opening program, visit: hkw.de/en.

­For Echoes of the Brother Countries, HKW cooperates with Rhizome, Algeria; NDONGO119, Angola; Ríos Intermitentes, Cuba; Foundation for Contemporary Art—Ghana; Heritage Space, Vietnam; Hanoi Ad Hoc, Vietnam. The project is funded by the Federal Agency for Civic Education (bpb) and by the TURN2 Fund of the German Federal Cultural Foundation (KSB). In association with the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation as part of the PARTENARIATS GULBENKIAN programme to support Portuguese and Lusophone art in European artistic institutions.

Contact: presse@hkw.de