The first exhibition devoted to Alfred Hilsberg and ZickZack ever to be mounted outside Germany. The exhibition will feature rare and unseen records, badges, flyers, and posters from the collection of Christian Iffland; photography and heady documentation by Sabine Schwabroh; and early Super-8 films of Klaus Maeck (filmmaker and founder, in 1979, of Hamburg's first punk store, Rip Off Records). The late 1970s and early 1980s was a period of imaginative intensity, wild recklessness and magnificent mutation in Germany. Not just in Berlin, but in cities and regions across the country, teenagers who had caught the punk virus unlearned their instruments, made strange synthetic sounds that the radio stations and major labels regarded as anti-music, and created a fierce, fractured poetry out of the German language. Abwarts, DAF, Der Plan, Einsturzende Neubaten, Malaria!, Palais Schaumberg, Xmal Deutschland: at the peak of the Cold War, a time of No Wave and No Future, these bands--and hundreds like them--radiated an energy, dark wit and a spirit of experimentation that is still arresting, and in some cases waiting to be discovered still in 2026.
Manhattan, New York, NY