WORPSWEDER KUNSTHALLE MÄRZ - NOVEMBER 2020
Focus " Zeitenwende"

My photographic exploration entitled “Der weiße Fleck/The White Spot” approaches the remnants of the Ministry for State Security (MfS) of the GDR from the perspective of a “posthumous author.”

The exhibition presents the photo project as a meditation on emptiness and history.
At its core is the artistic decision to document the perpetrators' locations without human presence.
Ivanka Penjak's photographs are devoid of protagonists and focus on the architectural and material sterility of the rooms. This clinical objectivity of the images—be it the former ministerial corridor of the MfS headquarters or the cramped isolation cells in Hohenschönhausen—demonstrates the coldness and bureaucratic meticulousness of the former security apparatus.
Today, these once invisible places are accessible as memorials and museums.
The project forces the viewer to confront the physical relicts of this past, which once served to subjugate and isolate people.
The exhibition thus offers a direct look at the historical infrastructure of oppression.