Andreas' Room

Children’s Gang in Portrait
The second floor of the Children’s Art Lab is equipped with a variety of tools, devices, and materials. This space is all about doing things together. Here, experiences from the exhibition Siblings – Awesome & Annoying can be deepened through your own experiments.

Siblings’ portraits in black-and-white photography captivate through the use of light and shadow, composition, proportions, visual language, rhythm, and materiality. The relationships between bodies and spaces, facial expressions, and gestures can be captured for eternity with a single click. This is why this medium is particularly suitable for visually exploring sibling relationships.

For the Andreas Room, we have therefore compiled copies of some of the most famous sibling photographs from the Global North over the past 100 years. Included are August Sander’s intense social studies, showing the conditions under which siblings lived in different economic circumstances. Also featured are Joanna Piotrowska’s unique contemporary studies of family situations, capturing the tension between closeness and discomfort. Likewise, the iconic twin photographs by Diane Arbus, a student of the legendary Austrian photographer Lisette Model, are presented—images that have etched themselves into our cultural memory. Remarkably for the late 1960s, Arbus’s children look at us without any playful innocence.*

Beyond discussions and studies of these wonderful portrait and social works, visitors can now create their own exhibition of favorite portraits and draw them.

In the Andreas Room, three pedestals with glass panels are available for this purpose. These vertical glass elements are modeled after the legendary exhibition design of architect Lina Bo Bardi. They offer many possibilities:

• Stand facing each other with the glass panel in the middle. Stretch tracing paper over the glass and draw each other at the same time.
• Take a picture, photo, or mobile photo, a copy, or a drawing, and stick it on the back of the glass so that the front is visible from the front side. Then place tracing paper on your side and trace it.
• Sit on the steps and look into the mirror tile installed there. Draw yourself.
• Combine and expand your drawings as you like. Can you think of other ways to create something new?
• You can hang your results on the metal wires above the steps in the room or take them home.

Mona Jas
*Additional portraits by: Walker Evans, Helen Levitt, Vivian Maier, Nicholas Nixon, Helga Paris