Searching for the Face of a New Time

Whether in the visual arts, literature, cinema, science or fashion–in the crises after World War I, the fascination with “types” was largely influenced by a debate that was pervasive in the Weimar period: the search for the “face of the era.” People were looking for new role models, and the portraits by artists of the New Objectivity movement such as Otto Dix, George Grosz, Jeanne Mammen and Hanna Nagel testify to this. Many of the clichéd images, such as those of the “new woman” or the “worker,” however, continue to have an effect in the present, reminding us with their classification of individuals of a problem that lives on in today’s bigotry. A broad spectrum of contributors from art history, medical history, media studies, and sociology venture into a detailed investigation of the historical context of the 1920s and the complex interactions between art and its time. An installation developed especially for the exhibition by contemporary artist Cemile Sahin, born in 1990, spans an arc to the present.