Andrea Geyer

“The Bauhaus was never a myth for me. It was a piece of GDR childhood,“ says filmmaker Anne Berrini, who grew up in Dessau, in her partly autobiographical documentary. In 2005, she went in search of photographers Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola, who once met at the Bauhaus. She followed their traces from Germany to Argentina to New York and interviewed friends, relatives, artists and scientists. Whether Buenos Aires, the female psyche or marginalized indigenous peoples – the view of the artist couple was new, avant-garde, provocative. From the role model of women to emigration from Europe to the New World – on her journey, the filmmaker questions perspectives of the past and the present.

"My desire is to make you realize that art is not dead, can never die while we exist, but is constantly, through our living in the making." In the next instance a seemingly endless pile of postcards made from portraits are stacked one atop another, from the blues singer Gladys Bentley to the collector Katherine S. Dreier to the performer Josephine Baker. The video, Insistence (2013), created by Andrea Geyer and recently acquired by MoMA, reveals a massive network of women who laid out the cultural landscape of modernism. This network is exposed by weaving together stories about the period’s unsung heroes: women. These stories highlight the everyday lived experiences of the women featured on the postcards, and their commitment to the arts at large. The continuous stacking of their portraits alludes to the fact that their influence is far-reaching, underrepresented, and an ongoing process that deserves further consideration.