The House of Brandenburg-Prussian History (HBPG) has a lot coming up in 2023: it will be 20 – and if everything goes according to plan, it will celebrate the anniversary on December 17 under a new name. Director Katja Melzer announced this during the annual conference on Thursday (February 2nd). She also did not shy away from criticizing the status quo of her own house: “He lacks public acceptance.”
This has to do with the awkwardness of the name, but also with its “unclear meaning”: “It is not clear that there is an exhibition and event location behind the ‘house’,” says Melzer. Although the cultural and social activities related to Brandenburg are an absolute unique selling point.
Everything is at your disposal
That should change with the new name. How that could be called is still open. In the spring you want to go into a process of finding a name. The declared goal: to be more memorable and easier to communicate – and to better reflect to the outside what is happening inside.
Cultural actors, donors and cooperation partners should join forces to find a name in workshop formats. According to Melzer, the question of how to describe the place becomes essential: Is this a museum, an exhibition space, a forum, a quarter? “The process is open. I can’t say anything about which words appear in the name and which don’t.”
The process is open. I can’t say anything about which words appear and which don’t. Everything is at your disposal.
Katja MelzerDirector, on the new name of the HBPG
Conversely, this means: “Everything is up for grabs.” Also the word Prussia in the name. There had already been perceptible resentment about this: Anyone who wanted to eradicate the term “Prussia” had “no differentiated understanding of history,” said Erik Stohn, cultural policy spokesman for the Brandenburg SPD.
art and climate change
The new name is the core project at the HBPG for 2023, but the house also has some plans in terms of content. For the Potsdam location and the local HBPG, an increased orientation towards artistic projects can be observed.
It may have existed in the past, but the density of artistic interventions is new and “definitely trend-setting”, says Katalin Krasznahorkai, who has been curatorial director for the various fields of activity of the Brandenburg Society for Culture and History (BKG) since May 2022 . “For us it is very important that we become a visitor-oriented house,” says Krasznahorkai. “And especially for a young audience, artistic contexts offer access to get closer to the country’s and cultural history.”
Four special exhibitions are planned in Potsdam 2023, three of which are dedicated to global climate change and its consequences in Brandenburg. The sound installation “Melting Gallery” by Diana Lelonek and Denim Szram can be experienced until April 9th: A room with twelve loudspeakers that make it possible to experience what it sounds like when the glaciers in the Alps are disappearing. A journey into the interior – of the visitors, but also of the museum.
The resource-saving show should also encourage people to think about their own exhibition practice, says Melzer. About the paradox that one floor down, a permanent air-conditioned exhibition eats up a lot of energy.
From April 21 to June 18, photographs by Götz Lemberg, who portrays the border river Oder in his cycle “Oder-Cuts”, can be seen. Tanja Engelbert’s video installation “Toxic Landscapes” (July 6 to September 10) is also about landscapes as a mirror of our time. The photo exhibition “Shift Change” by Christina Glanz follows at the end of September as the “highlight of the year” (Melzer). It is to be her most extensive exhibition to date: with motifs from the briquette and coal factories in Lauchhammer, southern Brandenburg. They were all shut down and demolished by 1994.
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