Why Pink?

A photograph from 1946 is the reference point for the exhibition design – a “re-enactment” of this picture – at Architekturzentrum Vienna. The reference shows the installation of the exhibition “Never Forget! An Antifascist Exhibition”, and was taken at the Künstlerhaus Wien in 1946. Our design concept for the exhibition at Az W in 2015, an exhibition of the Klaus Steiner Archive to be shown for the first time: of an archive of urban and regional plans of National- Socialist Vienna, is based on this moment of installation in 1946. The design is a re-enactment of an unfinished situation: Seven decades after the end of the Nazi regime, a start is only now being made to process the history of urban and spatial planning in Nazi Vienna, as well as of the history of the lack of awareness of the depth of architecture´s involvement with Nazism, as well as of visible, and invisible, continuities in urban planning and development. The history of violence that many of these plans result into — “Aryanisation”, forced labour, expulsion and organised mass murder — is not captured in the original documents on display. This, too, is reason for the “reconstruction” of an unfinished moment: unfinished — and yet still clearly with a distinctive positioning. The walls of the 1946 exhibition “Never Forget!” were definitely not painted pink; yet we use this color in the exhibition because it would have been anathema to the Nazis, and counteracts the sense of appropriation into the present time. An exhibition of first allusions in mid-installation.

Gabu Heindl, Toledo i Dertschei