Andrea Pichl – Values of Economy

Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin

Exhibition documentation, 2024–2025

This series documents Andrea Pichl’s large-scale installation Values of Economy at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. The commission focused on installation views and the relationship between Pichl’s modular structures and the museum’s architecture, showing how standardised building elements and everyday objects become a stage for post-1989 economic and social transitions in Germany.

Exhibition text by Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart

For the exhibition, Andrea Pichl (b. 1964, lives and works in Berlin) has devised an architectural installation dealing with the economic transfer between West and East Germany and the transformation occurring after 1989. The public plays a role in the staged scenario, which incorporates commonplace, largely standardised and mass-produced building components and objects.

Pichl removes items and spaces from their original context, scrutinising them and inquiring which image of humanity and notion of social coexistence imbue them. How do invisible structures such as state power, flows of capital and historical upheaval manifest themselves? Where does the public sphere end and the private one begin? When does a utopian vision turn into dystopian reality?

[Text source: Hamburger Bahnhof]