Berliner Plätze

Narrator: Mehretu made this painting while living in the German city of Berlin. 

Julie Mehretu: When you're walking around there are blocks and blocks where you see these kind of quick contemporary buildings that have been constructed, and you can tell, because as you look down the rest of the street, you see this early nineteenth century, late nineteenth century, twentieth century buildings, but all of a sudden, you get to the corner and in the corner it's all these new buildings, and clearly that's where a bomb had been dropped.

Narrator: Mehretu based the images here on a book of postcards depicting these former domestic architectures. They became the foundation of a meditation on the present, which reflected her opposition to U.S. warfare in Iraq and around the world. 

Julie Mehretu: Berlin specifically brought up a different context for thinking around not just urban space, but how the trauma of history is embedded in space and how visceral that is in Berlin.

In the middle of this, in 2008, we were still deep in the Iraq War.

I thought a lot about social responsibility, agency, and how fundamentally as a citizen, thinking around those ideas of nation-states or global citizenship, how do you negotiate, and how do you come to terms with taking that form of responsibility? And it really shifted how I could think around the history of Germany and being there.

What I think is the most interesting is as you walk across the painting it becomes a vertiginous experience because of optically what happens within the wire frame drawings and the way that it's drawn. The painting actually fluctuates while you walk around it. It can be somewhat disorienting.