“This must be the Place,” but what kind of place is it?

The eponymous song by the American rock band Talking Heads from 1983 is a love song. A love song without a narrative story, without a fairy-tale narrative. It describes situations, actions, and feelings in a fragmented way. It is neither temporally nor spatially defined, without claiming absolute truth.

The current sculpture exhibition in the garden of Villa Schöningen, in cooperation with the Ruttowski;68 Gallery, opened under this title in the summer. Now, from September 17 to November 28, 2021, a complementary exhibition is being held inside the house. While the sculptures in the garden were all created within the last few years or even months, some in direct reference to the garden, the works presented by the 28 artists in this exhibition come from a larger time span of 100 years.

For example, the painting “Zerrissene Welt (Abstraktion)” by Rudolf Schlichter from 1917, which combines individual, almost torn body parts with abstract forms. Artworks like Schlichter’s are both documents of their time and contain a relevance that spans the past century. The brutality and formal division within his painting reflects societal division then and now. Or Fabian Treiber’s work “Long Time Incident” from 2021, which deals with the subject of the interior, not in the pure representation of a specific place but through thematic and typological references, leaving room for memories and the future.

It’s not a building or a geographical location, but society, political circumstances, and humans that shape the type of place that emerges. Like Villa Schöningen, commissioned by the Prussian king, used as a children’s home in the DDR, and finally as an exhibition space since 2009.

In the current exhibition at Villa Schöningen, the artworks refer to individual moments, themes, and emotions and achieve something timeless and universal, especially without claiming absoluteness. Just like the singer of Talking Heads, who searches for the place he can call home in the song and realizes that he has actually already found it:

Home, is where I want to be
But I guess I’m already there.