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Daphna Westerman’s Postcards in Motion

One of Daphna Westerman’s postcards, front view. © Jewish Museum Berlin, Photo: Lisa Albrecht

Did you find a postcard like this one in your mail box as well? Or have you even pulled the entire road movie by Daphna Westerman out of our Art Vending Machine? By now the Machine is sold out completely. But no need to stop the movie! Let’s just rewind a little…
Before the work of the Israeli artist ended up in the museum’s Art Vending Machine, I received a postcard with a black and white photograph. Except for my address and the title, “U-Bahn Berlin. From In and between the cities, 2011. A film by Daphna Westerman,” there was nothing more to it. A few days later more cards were in the mail. Time to phone Daphna. → continue reading

Portrait of Ruthe Zuntz © Ruthe Zuntz

Less than three months after our art vending machine was filled with another 1,400 commissioned art objects, it has sold out. Visitors to the museum might have pulled a picture by Ruthe Zuntz from the machine. Pieces from her “PHOTOMAT: Challenging WallMAT” series, as the photographer entitled her square Dibond aluminum prints which cover ten different motifs, could be sparkling in many new households – like Ruthe herself whom I recently met.

Ruthe, you’re actually known for large, space-filling installations. And yet, for the art vending machine you produced a series of small photo prints. How did that happen?

I found the project really exciting because it matches one of my basic philosophies: → continue reading

“Poster stamps?” A short pause, a puzzled look. “And… what are poster stamps?” This was more or less the reaction of every one of my friends and acquaintances when I told them these last months about ‘what I’m working on at the museum right now’. Namely, an exhibition on poster stamps.

Poster stamp from the publisher M. Fickel © Jewish Museum Berlin, photo: Jens Ziehe, gift of Peter-Hannes Lehmann

Poster stamps, I would answer, are small promotional pictures, a little bigger than stamps. They were used as advertisements for products and stores just about exactly a hundred years ago. Some of the stamps were designed by well-known artists like Lucian Bernhard and people would collect them, particularly children.

I didn’t know much more than that about these poster stamps before I started researching for our cabinet exhibition “Pictures Galore and Collecting Mania – Advertising in Miniature”. The show begins on 4. December, 2014 and lasts until 31. May, 2015 at the Rafael Roth Learning Center. To learn more about the relevance that the stamps had before World War I, I began reading contemporary advertising manuals and magazines.
At first I found relatively little on the subject, → continue reading