The exhibition “The Polenmarkt is Back” invites visitors to engage with the social, political, and cultural significance of German-Polish border markets—through objects, photographs, and personal stories collected as part of an art-based research project.
In summer 2023, artist Paula Kaniewska and sociologist Vivien Sommer opened a pop-up research residency at the Polenmarkt Hohenwutzen, a border bazaar located in Poland, but catering mostly to customers from Germany. There, they interviewed both sellers and buyers, documented purchased goods, and listened to stories that touched on themes such as cultural proximity and distance, cost of living, global production chains, racism, counterfeit goods, and shopping tourism.
The exhibition presents these collected items and narratives, offering an intimate look at the market as a site of material flow, social exchange, and spatial negotiation.
In November 2023, the project expanded through a workshop titled “How to Think About Borders Through Art”, held at the CRC. The session reflected on how artistic and sociological approaches can complement each other—drawing on the concept of multiple spatialities, which helps explain how different societal challenges produce diverse spatial forms and transformations.
These insights will feed into the final outcome of this project, scheduled for April 2025: an immersive exhibition bring back the Polenmarkt back to Berlin – a reference to the historic Polenmarkt that emerged in the early 1990s in Berlin—once visited by up to 40,000 shoppers a day—reconnecting it with today’s border markets and raising questions about what has changed, what remains, and how spatial narratives evolve across time and place.
