We are happy to invite you to the first chapter of the exhibition program Phantom Pförtnerhaus, where participating artists engage with a former Pförtnerhaus (guard house) at the entrance of a cemetery—now reactivated as a site for exhibitions and research. Built in the 1920s and altered over time, the building carries layered traces of historical rupture, everyday use, architectural and affective change.
The term Pförtner (from German Pforte, “gate” or “threshold”) refers to a mythological figure - a gatekeeper of passage and in-between states: mediating inside and outside, presence and absence, the living and the dead.
The house and cemetery are approached as an affective archive of phantoms. Unlike ghosts, which return as identifiable figures, phantoms are unstable and partial presences. They persist as traces, atmospheres, and discontinuities—embedded in material surfaces and spatial memory, sensed in what is no longer fully present. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s fragmented conception of history and Mark Fisher’s hauntology, the program reflects on how past temporalities—and futures that never came—continue to shape the present.
In a time marked by polarization and historical amnesia, it resists closure and simplification, opening the space for more complex ways of relating to the present—where looking into the past becomes a way of reimagining contemporary conditions and their potential futures.
Opening April 25 15:00 - 19:00
Duration: April 25 - May 23
Performance by
Olga Hohmann
@olgahohoh 15:30
Parochial-Friedhof
FriedenstrĂźe 82
10249 Berlin-Friedrichshain
‼️Cemetery Entrance
The corner of Friedenstr./Weidenweg‼️
Curator:
Iana Pitenko
@according_to_iana
Artists:
Stefano Comensoli_Nicolò Colciago
@sc__nc
Jane Garbert
@janegarbert
Olga Hohmann
@olgahohoh
Daniel Hanh
@danielhhan
David Kroell
@dkroell
Giorgio Mattia
@giorgiomattia__
Birgit Maria Wolf
poster
@danielhhan
Exhibition is opened by appointment till May 23