OBAMAINBERLIN  VADIM ZAKHAROV / NIKLAS NITSCHKE

The first excursion heads into the region, without it being limited in any way. The space visited is the vacuum between the West and East still palpable here, which shows, for example, in the fact that the former German villages on the Polish side have barely been renovated. For decades the Polish, who were resettled here, originating from the border region with Russia, thought that these territories would eventually be restituted, and thus - not only because of their poverty – hardly altered their houses.

One concern of this first excursion is to find a figure, a mask (of a scientist, a fool, a bureaucrat, ...), in order to deploy, under their enframing condition, a point of view on the emptiness. The trip leads up to the square in front of the ruins of the Baroque castle in Zary (formerly Sorau). On the way, just before the entrance to the village Grodziszcze, Zakharov, in conversation, shapes a core motif of artistic practice in the “dead zone”: its remoteness must be shown from the perspective of tender affection.

In Zary, Nitschke presents in front of the empty windows of the castle facade a gift to Zakharov, consisting of a lion’s mask and three angular boards painted with a black and a white part, torn out of card boxes. When presenting, from behind the mask, Nitschke describes the model of coexistence of artists outlined in the volume Support by Jan Verwoert. Here Verwoert draws on the image of Jerome meeting the Lion, who actually threaten each other’s existence, but due to an unexpected reversal of their given relationship find a surprising form of peaceful coexistence. The handing over is interrupted by a young woman, who exhaustively inquires about the background of the mask, becoming the unknown addressee of the offering.