Das Stasi Panoptikon [2026]
Music video
Naeem Mohaiemen returns to an excavation from 2018, when he failed to find, in the Stasi (Ministry for State Security) Archives, traces of Bangladeshi members of Jashod (National Socialist Party) who escaped to East Berlin. Returning after eight years, he considers the blind spots in the panopticon eye of the Stasi during the Cold War. Building an exuberant collage of American propaganda newsreels about the Berlin Wall, he pairs it with the German punk song “Ein Jahr (Es geht voran)" ["One Year (It's moving onward)”] (1980) by Düsseldorf-based Fehlfarben. In the propulsive lyrics, the 1979 crash-landing of the Skylab space station and the 1980 arrival of a cowboy president in the White House, are bracketed by an ironic slogan of “progress.” Mohaiemen juxtaposes newsreel optimism about Cold War Berlin with the impending limits of postwar industrial growth. The »Engschrifft font« used in the video references the rise of standardized German railway signs. On a companion wall are a series of cyanotypes, speculatively mapped onto latitude-longitudes of historic points along the Berlin Wall: Checkpoint Charlie, U.S. observation area near Brandenburg Gate, Potsdamer Platz, White Crosses Memorial, and the Tränenpalast “Palace of Tears” terminal.