Ariane Müller: „Monument für Schröderstrasse“. Invited by Elisa R. Linn as part of „Public Afterlife“

Public Afterlife

On the site of Mies van der Rohe's November Revolution Monument, erected in 1926 and destroyed nine years later by the Nazi regime, curator and scholar Elisa R. Linn invites artist Ariane Müller to speak about her work Monument für Schröderstrasse (2005) and artist John Miller to present his lecture Public Art and The Law of Unintended Consequences. Drawing on her research on counter-public spheres in the GDR and in the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall, Linn introduces both artists’ presentations with a reading on Sybille Bergemann’s Das Denkmal (The Monument, 1975–1986) as well as Das Gespenst verlässt Europa (The Ghost Leaves Europe, 1990) by late Heiner Müller and Sibylle Bergemann. In the following conversations, Linn and the artists discuss which political histories persist through the presence and absence of a monument, and how art reshapes the public sphere in this context.

Monument für Schröderstrasse

Ariane Müller will speak about her work Monument für Schröderstrasse (2005), which addresses the social and spatial practices that emerged in the post-socialist ruins after 1989 and have since disappeared through redevelopment and gentrification. Referring to Schröderstrasse, a temporary artist-run space in East Berlin that could no longer exist, Müller's work, which recreates elements of it inside a museum, transforms the logic of the commemorative monument itself by turning interior and exterior inside out. Its multiple doors and reconstructed environment suggest both the openness of self-organized spaces and the paradox of preserving them within a museum. How can (counter-)monuments, understood not merely as objects but as practices, sustain political utopias and enact the right to the city as a mode of co-producing urban space?

Ariane Müller is an artist and a writer, living in Berlin and Vienna. Monument für Schröderstraße was a work for an exhibition at the MCA Sydney (Situation, 2005) comparing Sydney's, Singapore's, and Berlin's art scenes. It was also a starting point for the Museum of Society and Economy, which is at the moment a purely virtual space, conceived by Ariane Müller and trying to find visual, but not symbolic, signs for the social and political movements of our time. Ariane Müller is the founder and publisher of Starship magazine and of the publishing house by the same name. She has published books by Annette Wehrmann, Martin Kippenberger, and Hans-Christian Dany, among others. Her first novel, Handbuch für die Reise durch Afrika, was published in 2013 by the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Basel. She was a professor of art and text at HfBK Offenbach and taught a master's program in Umeå, Sweden. Last year, she had a solo presentation at the Vienna Secession.

Elisa R. Linn (Elisa Linn Roguszczak) is a curator, scholar, and writer. She founded and directs Bard College Berlin's first curatorial program, Spaces of Appearances: Exhibitions as Counter-Public Spheres. From 2022 to 2025, Linn was co-director of Halle für Kunst Lüneburg e.V., where she curated, among others, retrospective exhibitions of Jürgen Baldiga, Terre Thaemlitz, and Sophie Reinhold. She is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program. At the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, she is completing her doctorate under Marina Gržinić on the Berlin Wall as a “condom” in the context of counter-public practices and migratory aesthetics in the GDR. Linn has taught at numerous institutions and held the interim professorship of the Chair of Art Theory and Mediation (Prof. Dr. Kerstin Stakemeier) at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg in the summer semester 2022. Since 2012, she has co-directed the curatorial collective km temporaer, and since 2021, she has co-organized the Filmclub der polnischen Versager*innen in Berlin-Mitte.

Meeting point: The meeting point is the installation Monument to a Monument to a Monument at the site of the former Revolutionary Monument, Central Cemetery Friedrichsfelde, Gudrunstr. 20, 10365 Berlin.

Booking: Free of charge. Registration is requested at info(at)miesvanderrohehaus.de.

Next date:

• Date Saturday, 04/July/2026 17:00 bis 18:00
• Venue Zentralfriedhof Friedrichsfelde
• Address Gudrunstraße 20, 10315 Berlin-Lichtenberg