Created during the Intergenerational Solidarities: Graphic Novel Workshop at HKW in 2024, this selection of its outputs explores the aesthetics of visual narratives to reflect on the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Inspired by the stories shared during the workshop by Teresa Casanueva, Ricardo Bacallao, and Ibraimo Alberto, all of whom have biographical connections with the ‘brother countries’, the selected works by Kalina Mateeva, R. Stein Wexler, Rasha Chatta, Mirjam Kislat, and Sara Alvarado revisit history by reimagining these accounts. Through these works, comics as well as cover and poster art become an entry point through which to remember and reflect on the lives of former contract workers, situating individual and collective experiences in their particular sociocultural contexts by means of intermedial connections.

Mateeva’s work draws from abstraction and speculative futurism to create a visual language that simultaneously questions perceived assumptions of the past and challenges conventional approaches to storytelling. Chatta’s work deals more directly with post-memory, migration, and the everyday lives of migrant families, centring the challenges of displacement through drawn images depicting a public transport bus and a German ‘integration kit’, while Kislat’s work gathers collective memories, collaging them together via cut-out images and overlapping silhouettes. The intersection between the daily lives of migrant workers and public space are further thematized in the works of Alvarado and Wexler, respectively through a poster combining text with urban imagery and sparse street scene illustration, exploring the ways in which spatiality can be situated within narratives and silences.

Intergenerational Solidarities: Graphic Novel Workshop, HKW, January 2024
Workshop conveners: Hamed Eshrat with Thu Hoài Trần

Works in the exhibition: Sara Alvarado, Things are Looking Up (2024), poster art; Rasha Chatta, Neu in Deutschland? / New in Germany? (2024), illustration; Mirjam Kislat, Löwen, Götter (2024), collage/illustration; Kalina Mateeva, Homebound (2024), 2 illustrations; R. Stein Wexler, They were all called Berolinastraße and they all look just the same (2024), illustration; 6 prints, each 84.1 × 118.9 cm. Courtesy of the artists