I just returned from Monterrey, Mexico, where I saw great art and ate great quantities of food, including worms, crickets, ant eggs, and (really!) tonsils. Now we are opening two great shows in the museum this weekend: Virtuelle Mauer/ReConstructing the Wall is an interactive 3D computer graphics environment that allows users to experience a section of the Berlin Wall and its surrounding neighborhoods. Through their movements with a simple joy stick, users walk along the Berlin Wall at street level, encountering it as a disorienting, arbitrary barrier to freedom. The installation is set primarily in the mid-1980s, but in certain locations takes users to the 1960s or the present. Creators Tamiko Thiel and Teresa Reuter focused on the area between the West Berlin district Kreuzberg and the East Berlin district Mitte, stretching from the former border crossing at Heinrich-Heine-Strasse to the Engelbecken Park. Thiel and Reuter researched the historical, sociological, and urban conditions and to understand how the Wall’s presence and the constant possibility of escape attempts influenced everyday life, they interviewed people who lived in the area during the time of the Wall. The exhibition and those who were dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music features works that layer text, watercolors, spray paint, and oil by Los Angeles-based artist Cole Sternberg, a graduate of American University’s Washington College of Law. Pulling text from the Geneva Convention and Amnesty International, Sternberg uses his legal background to research his works and offer a critical analysis of international human rights. “Issues like genocide, slavery, and torture shouldn’t occur in a modern society, yet they happen worldwide everyday,” Sternberg said. “The inaction of governmental bodies has resulted in a world that doesn’t seem to care. My attempt is to bring some of these issues to a new audience and make people really think about what is going on out there.”
