Collective ideologies, communal practices, and women’s art in East Germany
Following a broad historiographic overview of feminist art histories and/in the erstwhile Eastern Bloc, the second seminar from When Technology Was Female zooms in on two case studies from within East Germany (Sibylle Bergemann and the Erfurt Women Artists’ Group), placing them alongside theoretical tracts published by Karl Popper and Lutz Gentsch in 1945 and 1992 respectively. If Popper and Gensch offer forth epistemological critiques of ‘the collective’ under state socialism, Bergemann and the women of Erfurt enact their analysis through embodied means, poetically and playfully pushing against the restrictive measures that would (and do) bind them. The seminar emerges from a masterclass workshop at the University of Amsterdam led by Altmann in November 2022 (more info here), which, together, with a public lecture and roundtable the preceding day (more info here) took as its focus the topic(s) of the collective, collectivity and collective practice, asking: What it would mean to approach questions around collective practice and German memory politics from the perspective of women artists who were working in the East? What would it mean to hold the historical, intellectual, and aesthetic collective ethos of Bergemann or of the Erfurt Women Artists’ Group next to the instrumentalized state forms of collectivity enforced by the party apparatus?
Talk Me Through...

Talk Me Through... is a five-episode podcast series that take listeners inside works of art that have been key in the development of Susanne Altmann’s research project When Technology Was Female. Drawn from the archive, episode two features an excerpt from the extensive walkthrough that Altmann did of the ‘Pants Wear Skirts’ exhibition at the nGbK Berlin with Hoetger. In the clip, she discusses two of the collective films made by the Erfurt Women Artists’ Group. Listen to episode two here.
Left: Still from Frauenträume. Super 8 film by the Erfurt Women Artists’ Group, ‘Exterra XX’, Erfurt (1986). Camera and editing by Gabriele Stötzer (Kachold). With performance contributions from Gabriel Göbel, Verena Kyselka, Monika Andres, Monique Förster, Ingrid Plöttner and Elke Carl. Right: Erfurt Women Artists’ Group [Künstlerinnengruppe Erfurt]. Name, Stadt, Land (Name, City, Country: after the German educational game), 1988. Newspaper costume and banner from the Super 8 film Komik Komisch (1988) created by Monika Andres.
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For further listening, other excerpts from the exhibition walkthrough have also been made available: ‘To Be a Visible Part of Society’ and ‘The Town of Erfurt and the Choice to Stay’ offer insights into the gender conditions under which the women of the Erfurt group lived and worked, as well as some reflections on the fraught politics of choosing to stay in East Germany. The final excerpt, ‘The News Anchor’, features one more small close reading moment, this time going inside Signale, the group’s final collective film from 1989.
Visual references

Erfurt Women Artists’ Group [Künstlerinnengruppe Erfurt]. Staged Group Shot [inszeniertes Gruppenbild] (1990). Photo: Christiane Wagner. From the archive of Gabriele Stötzer.
