Amsterdam’s finest pho­tog­ra­phy museum, FOAM Fotografiemu­seum, has what should be an excel­lent exhi­bi­tion open­ing on the 14th March. The new exhibit by Daniel & Geo Fuchs: STASI – Secret Rooms runs until the 4th June 2008, and doc­u­ments the inte­rior spaces used by the East German Stasi.

From the FOAM press release:

From 14 March 2008 Amsterdam’s pho­tog­ra­phy museum Foam presents STASI – Secret Rooms by the German artist duo Daniel & Geo Fuchs. The exhi­bi­tion opens up the hidden rooms once used by the STASI, the infa­mous East German secret ser­vice, in a series of mon­u­men­tal photos. While much of the former DDR infra­struc­ture has been destroyed, or given an entirely new func­tion, the clan­des­tine spaces that Daniel and Geo Fuchs pho­tographed are still in their orig­i­nal con­di­tion. Offices, cell com­plexes, bunkers, living quar­ters and inter­ro­ga­tion rooms: every­thing is exactly the way it was before ‘Die Wende’. The typ­i­cal East Euro­pean inte­ri­ors, with their func­tional fur­ni­ture and sober colours seem remark­ably stylised in ret­ro­spect. Yet above all, what this large, intrigu­ing project shows is the sym­bio­sis of archi­tec­ture, power and impotence.

In Jan­u­ary 2004, the Starke Foun­da­tion invited Daniel and Geo Fuchs to par­tic­i­pate in an artists-in-residence pro­gramme in Berlin. Fol­low­ing their suc­cess­ful Con­serv­ing and Famous Eyes projects, it was only now that they dis­cov­ered the full extent of the DDR’s struc­tural her­itage in Berlin. Besides the Palast der Repub­lik (the DDR par­lia­ment) this con­sists pri­mar­ily of offices of the Min­istry of State Secu­rity (STASI) in Licht­en­berg, Bautzen and Hohenschönhausen. Even today many of these places remain prac­ti­cally untouched.

Daniel and Geo Fuchs researched the his­tor­i­cal back­ground of these loca­tions and pho­tographed them metic­u­lously with an large format-​camera. They used a strict system, pho­tograph­ing each room from the same per­spec­tive. Thanks to the subtle fram­ing, appar­ently insignif­i­cant details acquire a new impor­tance and give each pic­ture an unusual inter­pre­ta­tion. A red phone, a large, archaic inter­com, typ­i­cally East German fur­nish­ings, a soli­tary cal­en­dar; it all seems as if it were delib­er­ately put in place by a fashion-​conscious styl­ist. That the real­ity is rather more sin­is­ter gives these pic­tures their typ­i­cally bitter after­taste: the places we see here are check­points, prison cells, and for exam­ple the res­i­dence and offices of the former min­is­ter of state secu­rity. Daniel and Geo Fuchs’s extremely pre­cise pic­tures grad­u­ally draw us into the mael­strom as we realise the awe­some absur­dity of this most recent chap­ter of German history.