Ulrike Kremeier is director of the Brandenburg State Museum for Modern Art, which houses the most comprehensive collection of art from the GDR with 45,000 works.
Photo: imago/Rainer Weisflog
What a beautiful view of the small pond from the museum!
In summer there is still a fountain in this pond. What interests me more than the bubbling is what happens next to it on the cozy bench and the green space as a social meeting place.
What brought you to the Diesel Power Plant Museum in Cottbus?
The collection that interested me and still interests me.
There is a long road between Lake Constance and Brandenburg, with many stages in life. What was important to you?
I started studying art history in Munich because the university’s art history institute was good, and acquired a very solid base in art history. That was important to me. Back then, I already had an explicit interest in critical discourses and socially relevant approaches to art and art education. That’s why I went to New York after my undergraduate studies and continued my studies at the New School. At the same time, I got to know contemporary artistic practice in New York.
Interview
Ulrike Kremeier, born in Lindau in 1964, became director of the Diesel Power Plant Museum in Cottbus in 2012. Together with the Museum Junge Kunst in Frankfurt (Oder), the Brandenburg State Museum for Modern Art emerged, of which she has been director since 2017.
With 45,000 works, it houses the most comprehensive collection of art from the GDR.
But you didn’t want to stay there?
It was great. But many aspects of life in the USA are not compatible with my ideas. As an educated, white European woman, I was quite privileged during my time studying there and yet: American social Darwinism is alien to me and we will never be friends. It was clear to me: I’m going back to Europe…
But not to a museum?
Back then, museums seemed rigid and slow to me. It was more important to me not only to organize exhibitions in traditional contexts, but also to create analogue structures that enable exposure in urban spaces, for example.
This ambition led you to France and ultimately to Docudemand X?
Since I speak French, I have always been involved in projects in France, such as the Projet Unité in Firminy. This was a large exhibition in a half-empty Le Corbusier living machine and aimed to reflect on identity and public space, modernity and the present together with residents of the crisis-stricken city, based on context-specific art interventions. That’s where I met Catherine David, who was appointed director of Documenta X shortly afterwards. She also has a very political concept of art and invited me to her team. I was then in Kassel for almost two years and trained the exhibition guides.
Her life path led her to the university in Leipzig. At the same time, you ran the “Platform” project space in Berlin.
I often worked in such a way that my activities were spread over two locations. Berlin was overrated and quite complacent in the 90s, there was freedom but no money. The discrepancy between what was happening in art and what was visible – especially in the area of cultural immigration – was striking. In Leipzig, on the other hand, the University of Graphics and Book Arts, for example, tried to reinvent itself. I felt it was a privilege that I got a position at the university and was able to work on a significant GFG research project. I had a significant third-party funding budget and enjoyed a great deal of independence in transferring theory to practice.
Why did you leave Leipzig?
With the Bologna Process, transdisciplinary work became increasingly restricted and very bureaucratic. I didn’t find that interesting anymore. And the French Ministry of Culture made an offer to take over the Passerelle Center d’art contemporain in Brest, then one of the largest art halls in France with a transdisciplinary program that was strongly rooted in the 70s and 80s. For me it was about the challenge of developing and asserting a new profile.
You have always been interested in working openly rather than presenting a collection, and now you are here precisely because of the collection.
Over the course of seven years, I’ve realized that the idea of collections is important to me. In France the museum landscape is structured differently. There are associative public art collections that different houses can work with. But for me a collection is more than a “pool” of works. So I was ready for a museum with a stringent collection concept.
What is special about the local art collection?
Two collection departments were founded in Cottbus in the 1970s, which were very progressive for the time. Cottbus collected photography as contemporary art and thereby created the only photographic department of this kind established in a museum in the GDR. The same goes for poster art.
Are you becoming calmer or are there new life projects?
(Laughs) Life projects aren’t really my category, but I want to finish things. I would like to run the State Museum until the cinema in Frankfurt (Oder) is finished becoming a new museum location at eye level and then it should be handed over to another generation of art historians.
An important step in your term of office was the merger of the Dieselkraft Cottbus art museum and the Junge Kunst Museum Frankfurt (Oder) to form a new Brandenburg statemuseum of modern art.
The merger was and is sensible in terms of content, structure and also economically, even if such a merging of art, collections, history(s), people and structures is not easy. But it is wonderful to see how two important, valuable and complementary collections can be interwoven through careful and continuous work on this.
What was the difference between the collections?
The collection in Frankfurt (Oder) was much more classical. The Cottbus collection, on the other hand, is more experimental and a bit wilder. What they have in common is the quality: everything was always collected at a high level. There was an enormous amount of money for purchases during the GDR era, and the directors bought across the republic. The identity of the BLMK is established through these historically built collections – and of course through the way in which we work with them today. The focus is art from the GDR. In this absoluteness it is our unique selling point. But of course we have to go beyond that and work on readability, its meaning for the present and the future, as well as placing the collection in other artistic and cultural contexts.
Which upcoming exhibition are you looking forward to?
In 2025 we will once again focus more on the 80s. Among other things, we are working on a joint exhibition with the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. A curator working there had discovered that the Getty had a collection of artists’ books from the GDR that had come there through strange routes and played a marginal role in the gigantic art institute’s program. I invited the curator and showed her our excellent artist books. A huge treasure! This also fascinated the Getty, so it will now co-finance a joint project. After Cottbus the exhibition goes to the USA.
Are there any breaks from art? How to relax – with paddling in the Spreewald?
No! I like spending time with my family on the couch, drinking good coffee, going to other museums, concerts, the theater, reading or just watching straight ahead for three hours.
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