History, Remembrance, and the Use of Public Space

A few years after the Wall came down, the Berlin city government launched a competition for a work of public art honoring the memory of Berlin Jews who perished in the Holocaust. The conceptual artists Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock submitted their idea, and won the competition. In 1993, they installed Orte des Erinnerns (Places of Remembrance), a permanent, decentralized memorial along the streets of Berlin’s district of Schöneberg documenting the anti-Semitic laws and decrees enacted incrementally by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945.

Stih & Schnock are conceptual artists based in Berlin. Their work explores how memory functions in the social sphere – and how it can be reflected in museums and urban spaces. Recognized internationally, articles about their collaborative work have appeared in the New York Times, New Yorker, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. They have also lectured at major U.S. universities including the Art Institute of Chicago, Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Emory, and Brown Universities. As part of 1014’s “Past & Future: A Weekend of Architecture, Culture, and Community,” the American Council on Germany will host a conversation with Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock on collective memory in society and the use of public space.

Stih & Schnock is a Berlin-based artist duo, formed by Renata Stih, a professor in Berlin and Lüneburg and a member of Berlin’s art in public space advisory commission, and Frieder Schnock, an artist, art advisor and a former curator at the Museum Fridericianum in Kassel. Their works deal primarily with collective memory in society. Human rights issues and the Holocaust are recurring reference points in their artistic interventions.

Renata Stih (painting, sculpture, art theory, College of Art in Karlsruhe/Germany) currently teaches art and technology, film, and media at Beuth University of Technology in Berlin and at Leuphana University in Lüneburg, and has published widely on art, film, and architecture. Frieder Schnock studied art and art history at the College of Art in Karlsruhe/Germany, TU Karlsruhe, FU Berlin, and College of Art Braunschweig, where he earned his PhD in art history. He developed the professionalization program at Berlin’s Artist Association with 1000 participants per year and teaches visual studies at Beuth University of Technology in Berlin and is a professor at Leuphana University.

Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock have been artists-in-residence and have also regularly lectured at U.S. universities and colleges, including Brown University, Princeton University, Columbia University, Rhode Island School of Design, UTexas Austin, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, University of Chicago, Maryland Institute College of Art, University of California, LA, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Zurich University of the Arts, among other. Their works have been exhibited at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, the Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale, the Jewish Museum of New York, the Museum London (Ontario), the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Boca Raton Museum of Art, and at New York University.