About the PROJECT

Bread Shoes
1991, Berlin
Excerpt from the film: Noch nicht und nicht mehr / Not yet and no longer, ©2000, Ingo Kratisch and Jutta Sartory, Exhibition: Museum Nikolaikirche, Berlin, 10.2.2025 – 4.6.2026

HEUTE NOCH, MORGEN SCHON / TODAY YET, TOMORROW SURELY 
Filmische Perspektiven auf Berlin um 1990 / Filmic Perspectives on Berlin Around 1990

“The film title alone, Noch nicht und nicht mehr (Not yet and no longer), speaks volumes of the condition of once-divided Berlin as a perennial construction site, ‘celebrating itself as it became something that could not yet be named. A city — replete with history — as the cryptic vision of its own future.’ From 1991 to 2000, Kratisch and Sartory observe the changing face of Berlin: its architecture, its everyday life. Woven into the film are guest appearances by artist friends, such as Ellen Rothenberg’s performance Hello Traitor! (1993), which comprises three actions performed across three different sites in Berlin: a street in Marzahn, the square in front of the Wittenbergplatz underground station, and the pedestrian area in Wilmersdorfer Strasse. In the latter, the Chicago and Berlin-based artist prepares two large bread loaves to be worn as shoes. She puts them on and stands silently in the middle of the busy area. Through this intervention in public space, Rothenberg uses the shoes — which echo the rough wooden clogs worn by inmates of National Socialist concentration camps — as a motif to question the extent to which the past dwells within the present. This can also take the form of a haunting: in the scene directly preceding Rothenberg’s reenactment, Sartory attempts to clean a swastika graffiti from a Jewish memorial stone which, disconcertingly, momentarily makes the symbol look even larger than it is.”   —Florian Wüst, curator