The 1970s and ’80s were a time when everything happened all at once in West Germany: the RAF, the oil crisis, Willy Brandt’s kneeling in Warsaw, feminist and gay emancipation, and the reckoning with the Nazi era and the Holocaust. A time when people could still say "Kanake" without a second thought. Back when war ruins still stood at Kotti in Kreuzberg, and Oranienstraße was full of vacant lots where Turkish children played. When the Bethanien was squatted, and Ton Steine Scherben sang:
"Mariannenplatz was blue, there were so many cops there/And pal Meier had to cry—it must’ve been the tear gas…" The exhibition "Kreuzberg: Art and Migration Since 1960" takes us back to precisely this era. And anyone who likes to get worked up about "woke" art from the Global South and thinks it’s just activist nonsense can keep getting worked up right here. Because the exhibition, curated by Gürsoy Doğtas and Patrizia Dander, brings realistic art forms to the Gropius Bau—forms that white postmodernism already looked down on with some disdain back in the 1980s. For example, the politically engaged art of artists from Greece, Turkey, or Iran who came to West Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s as dissidents and migrant workers.
This was not for fans of Kippenberger or Jeff Koons. For these works—completely devoid of irony, often painted in oil or carved in stone—addressed migration and exile, experiences of racism, the housing crisis, and the social and economic conditions of so-called "guest worker" labor. And the artists wanted their paintings, sculptures, or installations to be understood by as many people as possible. So what you see in this exhibition are primarily scenes from everyday life, snapshots of real-life realities: scenes from Oranienstraße, the subway, factories, and workshops, such as "Group Portrait with Siemens Workers" (1973) by the left-wing Berlin artist Monika Sieveking. Or Sohrab Shahid Saless’s influential film "Far From Home" (1975), which depicts the life of a migrant worker.
Against Ignorance
Saless (1944–1998) was an Iranian film director who, after emigrating, also helped shape the New German Cinema movement. There are also many other groundbreaking artists in the exhibition. Take, for example, Vlassis Caniaris (1928–2011), one of the most famous postwar Greek artists. His headless figures, formed from wire mesh, reduce the migrant experience to a suitcase and a few pieces of clothing. His groundbreaking exhibition "Gastarbeiter—Fremdarbeiter" (Guest Workers— Foreign Workers), which he presented at the nGbK in 1975, was a response to the shift in German migration policy. In 1973, a ban on recruiting guest workers went into effect, and in 1975, a ban on new arrivals was imposed in three Berlin neighborhoods. The mood toward foreigners grew more hostile. In response, the NGBK presented the exhibition "Mehmet Berlin’de/Mehmet kam aus Anatolien" at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in 1975, which Turkish-origin artists curated. For the first time, they addressed their own living and working conditions as immigrants. As part of the exhibition, there was a barbecue and celebration on Mariannenplatz.
The great thing about the exhibition at Gropius Bau is that Doğtas tells the story of migration as art history and attempts to fill a gap—including in formal terms. Doğtas, who has already organized several exhibitions on this topic and, as a creative mediator, recently co-curated Manifesta 16, calls this forgotten movement "pre-post-migrant." And he explains that it simply wasn’t covered in his studies.
When I admit that I found this realism unsettling myself, he tells me that in 2024, he dedicated an exhibition at Marta Herford to his mother, who was a pieceworker. It was her very first visit to a museum. When she stood in front of the "Group Portrait with Siemens Workers" and talked with the German artist about her impressions of the painting, he translated for her. It was an incredibly wonderful moment, he says, "because she recognized herself in the female workers depicted in the paintings and realized that her own life, too, was worth portraying." In that moment, it dawns on me that this art was able to speak to an audience that museums have forgotten. To this day, most people’s lives and work are not considered worthy of being depicted. You don’t see paintings of cashiers or Amazon delivery drivers in museums, nothing about working conditions or poverty. For a long time, I myself found this acceptable, without questioning my own conception of art, which always viewed the world from a privileged perspective. Perhaps this exhibition is a first step toward putting an end to this ignorance.
This article first appeared in Monopol's special issue on Berlin Art Week 2026.