Lena Henke: Auf dem Asphalt botanisieren gehen

Throughout her practice, Lena Henke produces sculptures and installations that intimately recast histories of modernism, design, and urban planning. Her process begins with research into the physical spaces in which she lives, works, and exhibits her artworks. Henke’s engagements with site-specificity result in sculptures whose often appropriated forms are at once rigorous and flirtatious. Her works challenge the patriarchal legacies of modern culture while bringing the lived experiences of gender to their surfaces. Henke’s new set of sculptures excavates the local histories and household artefacts of the Hansaviertel in Berlin, a neighborhood comprised of postwar modernist social housing where the artist’s studio is currently located.

While looking at archival photographs of Hansaviertel apartments, Henke noticed two recurring features. She observed Braun appliances in numerous interiors. In 1957, Braun participated in Interbau; of the model apartments on view in the Hansaviertel, sixty percent were furnished with Braun products.[1] What united Braun and the Hansaviertel was their shared renewal of modernism in postwar design.

Henke additionally noticed an awkwardness around kitchen spaces in photographs of Hansaviertel apartments. Minimal and narrow, these kitchens often included a retractable curtain, which provided a backdrop to the leisure space of the living room while hiding the kitchen’s gendered labor. For Henke, these concealable kitchens illustrated the power relations of male architects dictating women’s domestic labor through design, rendering their housework and care work invisible. In Auf dem Asphalt botanisieren gehen [“To go botanizing on the asphalt”], Lena Henke examines how long histories of design continue to affect gendered experiences of labor and urban space, from the perspective of kitchen appliances appropriated and reproduced into a sculptural scenography.

To compose her new series of sculptures on view, Henke digitally reworked four iconic Braun appliances of the postwar era. Each sculptural edition is complemented by the artist’s custom-designed packaging of black carton boxes with individual labels. The sculptures’ colors are derived from vintage Braun advertisements, while their skin-like rubber surfaces emphasize the appliances’ biomorphic shapes. Henke has retained the physical glitches that occur in the 3D printing process, which materialize on the sculptures as drips, leaks, and overflows.

In her installation of the sculptures, Henke engages with the physical site of Klosterfelde Edition and its surrounding environs of Potsdamer Strasse. The space was originally a lived-in apartment. Henke has arranged the appliance sculptures on a ramp descending from the small room at the back of the gallery, which was formerly a kitchen. The ramp is covered in green linoleum, a material frequently used for postwar kitchen floors. The ramp extends from the gallery’s former kitchen toward the street, conjuring feminist political entanglements of the personal and public realm.

Henke has excerpted the exhibition’s title Auf dem Asphalt botanisieren gehen from Walter Benjamin’s Das Passagenwerk [The Arcades Project] (1927–40), in which Benjamin characterizes the figure of the flâneur as an urban wanderer who “goes botanizing on the asphalt.”[2] Henke invokes the specters of Potsdamer Strasse’s layered histories by installing a red-tinted spotlight, whose roving light beam shines from the gallery’s former kitchen space onto the street. Conjoining domestic interiors and urban publics by imaginatively navigating across Berlin’s pasts and present, Henke’s exhibition subtly unearths the gendered exclusions of labor and care.

To enquire, kindly contact Alfons Klosterfelde. Text by Carlos Kong.

Supported by Bortolami, New York; Layr, Vienna and Pedro Cera, Lisbon. A new publication will accompany the exhibition and launched this fall, supported by the Berlin Senate.

[1] Klaus Kemp and Keiko Ueki-Polet (ed.), Less and More: The Design Ethos of Dieter Ram (Berlin: Die Gestalten Verlag, 2009), p. 351. [2] Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. I.2 (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1983), p. 538.