The exhibition Wohnkomplex: Art and Life in Plattenbau takes on a deceptively simple subject: the East German Plattenbau. These industrially prefabricated apartment blocks—once symbols of socialist promise—become, in this exhibition conceived by writer and curator Kito Nedo, prisms through which to explore the traumas, contradictions and unfinished stories of a divided and later reunified Germany.

With artworks spanning the 1970s to the present, Wohnkomplex unfolds across two floors of the private art institution DAS MINSK Kunsthaus in Potsdam. The museum itself is a former terrace café, repurposed as a contemporary art institution in 2022 through collector and tech billionaire Hasso Plattner’s foundation. It’s an apt setting for a show that spotlights a conversation around living architecture. The Plattenbau—as an idea and a reality—never became a thing of the past. It remains inhabited, reinterpreted and politicised—a backdrop that refuses to recede into history. Architecture here acts as both metaphor and material, embodying the ideological tensions of postwar Europe and the fragile continuities that followed.

To understand the exhibition’s charge, one must situate it in the longer arc of German history. After the Second World War, the country split into East and West, with Berlin on the Cold War front line. The GDR, like many states in the Soviet Bloc, embarked on an ambitious project to provide citizens with modern, egalitarian housing (although inequality persisted in the communist model: party members received higher-quality apartments at representative addresses). The Plattenbauten, built en masse from the 1960s onward, were meant to engineer utopian society through prefab slabs of concrete. But after 1990, many of these same spaces became symbols of rupture: sites of dislocation, marginalisation and, increasingly, of far-right radicalisation and deadly xenophobic violence.

That uneasy legacy is confronted head-on by Markus Draper in Grauzone (2015). In this installation, zinc maquettes of apartment blocks are displayed on plinths, stripped of context and reduced to ghostly replicas. At first, they read as abstracted studies in modernist form. But hung behind the models are photographic prints culled from redacted and blown-up newspaper clips, hinting at the darkness contained within the miniature walls. The accompanying wall text lands with quiet force: these are reconstructions of buildings where members of the Red Army Faction (RAF)—a far-left West German militant group responsible for a series of bombings, kidnappings and assassinations in the 1970s and '80s—were hidden in the GDR by the Stasi, East Germany’s infamous secret police. The Stasi (short for Staatssicherheit, or state security) was one of the most effective and repressive intelligence agencies in the Eastern Bloc, tasked with surveilling and controlling the population. In the final years of the Cold War, the agency covertly offered protection to RAF fugitives, embedding them under false identities in anonymous housing estates like these. The facades in Draper’s work—blank, mute, unremarkable—become complicit, revealing how ideology seeps into infrastructure, and how the architecture of everyday life can conceal violent political histories.

Henrike Naumann’s Triangular Stories (Amnesia & Terror), (2012) stages one of the show’s most haunting scenes. Installed on two juxtaposed corners, nondescript East German living rooms are reconstructed in seemingly forensic detail—wood veneer, cheap bric-a-brac and a Kaiser-era marine flag as wall decoration. Two video channels run on a loop on TV-sets in each of the two corners: on one, ravers spiral into euphoric oblivion; on the other, neo-Nazis loiter and pose. The work alludes directly to the right-wing terrorist cell known as the National Socialist Underground (NSU), whose three core members—Uwe Mundlos, Uwe Böhnhardt and Beate Zschäpe, seen in one of the videos—grew up in a small East German town and went underground in the 1990s after a series of police raids. Between 2000 and 2007, the NSU murdered ten people, nine of whom had immigrant backgrounds, and carried out multiple bombings and robberies while living anonymously in East German cities like Zwickau and Chemnitz—often in unremarkable housing blocks. Naumann is one of two artists representing Germany at the 2026 Venice Biennale. With this installation, which the artist showed as her graduation project, Naumann doesn’t preach—she stages. The horror lies not in spectacle, but in banality: these ideologies grew not in Biergartens or party halls, but in living rooms just like these.

If Draper and Naumann delve into how architecture conceals, Seiichi Furuya reminds us how it frames—and fragments—memory. His photographic series documents life in East Germany through the lens of personal loss: most notably, the life and suicide of his wife, the Austrian-born Christine Gössler, in 1985. Shot among Graz, East Berlin and Dresden, Furuya’s images oscillate between documentary and elegy. Everyday domestic spaces—kitchens, windows, stairwells—become thresholds between intimacy and absence, the private and the political. In the context of Wohnkomplex, Furuya’s work underscores how the built environment does not merely shelter life—it conditions our perception of it, even as it fails to hold it.

More subdued but equally resonant are Sabine Moritz’s pencil drawings of her childhood block in Zwickau. Rendered in soft greys, they neither criticise nor glorify. Like memory itself, they flicker between presence and erasure. Meanwhile, Uwe Pfeifer’s paintings of Halle-Neustadt offer a more austere view—one drained of both colour and ideology. Their desaturated palette and repetitive compositions hint at a life shaped as much by system as by survival.

Manfred Pernice’s Hässliche Luise (2004) is a sculptural installation that combines rough, industrial materials with found objects and archival remnants. Red metal joints jut out of concrete blocks and are arranged in Pernice’s characteristic provisional, almost makeshift aesthetic. The work feels both architectural and archaeological, resembling a construction site paused mid-process or a fragment of a building unearthed and reassembled in a gallery space. Contextually, Hässliche Luise refers to a specific residential building in Berlin-Mitte, nicknamed ‘ugly Luise’, that was demolished in 2004 (despite its relatively recent construction in 1990) to make room for government buildings in the reunified German capital. Pernice uses this site—and its destruction—as a case study to explore themes of urban erasure, the politics of taste and the social memory embedded in architecture.

The exhibition's strength lies in its refusal to offer resolution. Instead, it orchestrates a rare, critical conversation about architectural legacy, social utopia and the often bruising aftershocks of progress. As Nedo notes, “The exhibition fuses artistic practices with social and political concerns, reflecting how urban spaces shape lives and collective structures.” What does it mean to live inside a relic of a history that refuses to end? What stories do walls absorb—and which ones do they silence? Fittingly, DAS MINSK doesn’t just host the exhibition; it performs it. Like the works inside, the building resists nostalgia and easy closure. It stands as a reminder that history is never simply past—it is a framework, still inhabited.

‘Wohnkomplex: Art and Life in Plattenbau’ is on view from September 6 – February 8, 2026, at DAS MINSK Kunsthaus, Potsdam, Germany.

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