Prefab housing rarely enters the exhibition space, and when it does, it is often framed as either failure or nostalgia. “Wohnkomplex: Art and Life in Plattenbau,” on view at DAS MINSK Kunsthaus in Potsdam, takes a different approach. The exhibition refuses monumentality and sentimentality, treating the Plattenbau not as a closed chapter but as a lived and ongoing condition. It approaches it as a social political project, a site of collective memory, and a place where life continues.

Rather than isolating East German prefab housing as an architectural object, the exhibition understands it as a cultural resonance space. The works ask how housing estates have been negotiated in art since the 1970s and how urban space shapes belonging and social structures. Importantly, the exhibition resists the temptation to rehabilitate the Plattenbau through aesthetics alone. Its contradictions remain visible, moving between utopia, everyday life, and post socialist change.

Still, moments of quiet romance appear. Uwe Pfeifer’s paintings from the 1970s are rooted in a sober, almost objective style. Reduced and restrained, they depict everyday scenes of neighborhoods with subtle poetry. Streetlights, parked cars, and open spaces suggest an early optimism about modern living that later events made more complex. Elsewhere, the exhibition introduces friction. Markus Draper’s models, reveal an architectural language shaped by ideology and social urgency. They remind viewers that these buildings were never merely functional solutions, but spatial expressions of a political system. The short film Klub 2000 Rom Paris Marzahn captures everyday life at the city’s edge, shaped by expectations, projections, and hope.

The exhibition’s strength lies in its use of media. Installations, films, drawings, and photographs create overlapping perspectives rather than a single narrative. A free audio guide, a slim booklet, and a carefully considered online presentation extend this logic. At a time marked by housing shortages and debates about collective living, “Wohnkomplex” feels remarkably current.

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