Artist Talks on the exhibition Wohnkomplex

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Christian Thoelke was born in East Berlin in 1973. From 1993 to 1999, he studied painting at the Berlin-Weißensee Academy of Art with Wolfgang Peuker. He spent his time as a master student from 2001 to 2003 at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig with Ulrich Hachulla. His works were most recently on display in the exhibition “Dissonance - Plattform Germany” at the National Museum of Romania in Bucharest (November 10, 2024-February 23, 2025) and will continue to be shown until December 7, 2025, in the exhibition “Paradise” at the Stiftung Kunstforum Berliner Volksbank. Thoelke lives and works in Berlin. 

Sabine Rennefanz, born in Beeskow in 1974, became immediately famous as an author with her bestseller “Eisenkinder. Die stille Wut der Wendegeneration” (Iron Children: The Silent Anger of the Post-Reunification Generation). She is one of Germany's leading columnists, was a long-time editor at the Berliner Zeitung, and works as a journalist for Der Spiegel and Der Tagesspiegel, among others. She has been awarded the Theodor Wolff Prize and the German Reporter Prize for her reports and essays. Kosakenberg was published in 2024. She lives with her family in Berlin.  

Markus Draper, born in Görlitz in 1969, studied at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, Central Saint Martins College in London, and Columbia University in New York from 1991 to 2000. He graduated as a master student under Professor Ralf Kerbach. Draper has received numerous awards and scholarships, most recently a working scholarship from the Berlin Senate (2025). His works have been exhibited at the Cultural History Museum in Görlitz (2015), the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin (2023), and the Dresden State Art Collections (2024). Markus Draper's work sheds light on significant events in recent history from new perspectives and highlights ambivalences. He examines how certainties are shattered and how media images reinforce this uncertainty. Furthermore, he raises the question of whether truth always remains a construct of history and stories. 

Dr. Jennifer Allen is an art teacher and critic based in Berlin. She was editor-in-chief of frieze d/e and has written columns for frieze, artforum, and Mousse, as well as numerous essays on contemporary art for German and international publications. In 2009, she received the ADKV-ART COLOGNE Prize for Art Criticism. 

Sabine Moritz, born 1969 in Quedlinburg, Germany, lives and works in Cologne. Moritz’s work explores the dynamics of how memory is constituted and the way in which it is subject to a continual process of deformation and reformation. Described by Hans Ulrich Obrist in 2013 as ‘memories made visual – the fleeting impulses of the past rendered concrete in art’, Moritz’s paintings, by turns abstract and figurative, activate an awareness of time. They are records of specific, highly personal experiences that open out onto the general horizon of a collective history, from the artist’s childhood in the East German town of Jena, to the abstract notions of transience, decay and seriality. Moritz’s work may be interpreted, above all, as a protest against forgetting, while also stating in no uncertain terms the inherent fragility, mutability and immateriality of memory. 

Georg Imdahl is an art critic and is a member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) since 1993. After studying philosophy, modern history, and political science at Ruhr University Bochum, he earned his doctorate in 1995 at Witten/Herdecke University under Franco Volpi with a thesis on Martin Heidegger's early work. Numerous teaching assignments followed, some lasting several years, in contemporary art and art criticism at the universities of Essen/Duisburg, Konstanz, Cologne, and Bochum, as well as at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig. Since 1991, he has been writing for the FAZ arts section, and later also regularly for DLF, Texte zur Kunst, and artforum. In 2009, he took on a guest professorship at the University of Fine Arts Münster and since 2011 he has held the professorship for Art and the Public there. ** 

Book publication: Ausbeute. Santiago Sierra und die Historizität der zeitgenössischen Kunst, Hamburg, 2nd edition, 2023 (translated into Spanish in 2021).