At the 2022 Venice Biennale, the artist Maria Eichhorn exposed the foundations of the German Pavilion, long the event’s most controversial building. By tearing up a stretch of the travertine floor and parts of the wall plaster, she revealed the remains of the original building before it was altered in 1938 according to the monumental principles of Nazi architecture.
For Cagla Ilk, curator of the German Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale, that bold artistic act was a sort of exorcism. “When Maria Eichhorn opened the ground, I felt that everything went out,” she explained. Freed of the ghosts of the building’s past, she felt that her task as curator was to find a way to fill the symbolic void left by Eichhorn’s interventions. “Now we need to put it back [together] and make it again,” Ilk said.
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