Exterra XX – Künstlerinnengruppe Erfurt

KW Institute for Contemporary Art

Active in the former German Democratic Republic in the decade preceding Germany’s reunification and a few years thereafter, from 1984 to 1994, Exterra XX – Künstlerinnengruppe Erfurt transformed from a fringe art group into a cultural lobbying force in Thuringia’s conservative capital city.

The group’s uncanny shape-shifting abilities, rooted in the free-spirited approach of its fifteen-something members and the diversity of their activities—including salon-style home-gatherings, filmmaking, fashion and object shows, performances, exhibition-making, and institution-building)—are evidenced over time in the group’s myriad names, which included Avantfemme, Undine, Atlantis, and Exterra XX. These names suggest a radical feminist slant and the potential for power that had developed among all the women over the years.

The material chosen for the Artists’ Street provides documentary evidence of one of the most volatile aspects of the group’s variegated practice: runway shows displaying imaginative fashion objects. At these events, designs based on the women’s dreams and traumas were presented to a public of supporters, fellow artists, and creatives from Erfurt’s largely underground scene in the 1980. This might also be the collective’s most emblematic activity, bringing out the daring carnivalesque register typical of old medieval marketplaces from whence their situated practice in Erfurt also sprang, in contrast to the private-is-political ethos born of Stasi-era scars and scares of earlier days from which the group emancipated itself to become a full-grown female cultural movement.

Former Courthouse Lerther Straße

As an entity that only exists through the law, the state will use every means of that same law to maintain itself. The Ministerium für Staatssicherheit [Ministry for State Security]—known colloquially as the Stasi—was established in 1950 as a means to surveil citizens of what was then East Germany through a network of civilian informants. Their tactics were frequently subtle yet brutal, relying on forms of social sabotage and weaponized bureaucracy to isolate individuals from the wider community, limiting the potential for collective action on a meaningful scale.

This was the context in which the Exterra XX – Künstlerinnengruppe Erfurt was forged. Initiated in 1984, the collective developed from a regular meeting of women sharing artistic ideas into an artist association that produced and exhibited films, performances, fashion, and other forms of visual art and design. As member Monika Andres summarized, “we were furies, ordinary gals, women who didn’t fit into any clichés, not even ones like escapist, antiestablishment, punk, hope, ‘church’ or female artist.”

Early in the morning on December 4, 1989—mere days after East Germany broke with the socialist system—heightened air pollution levels were measured in Erfurt and other East German cities, corroborating reports that Stasi headquarters were burning their files. Five women—among them Exterra XX – Künstlerinnengruppe Erfurt members—led a collective action that would later be referred to as the group’s “greatest performance.” Threatening to sue the Stasi for the destruction of public property, the women launched an occupation of the Stasi headquarters in Erfurt and took control of the evidence of their years of oppression.

Text KW Institute for Contemporary Art: Claire Tancons

Text Former Courthouse Lehrter Straße: Kate Sutton