It has been over 20 years since I was last in Germany and even then my time in Berlin was limited and mainly based around drinking and clubbing.
2016 brought an opportunity for my husband and I to exhibit the Minotaur work in a Berlin gallery and this also brought an opportunity to explore and try and get an understanding of the complex history of the city.
Of all the places we visited in our brief few days, Checkpoint Charlie was the most poignant and revealing of the period when the city was divided by opposing political ideologies represented by the wall that ran through Berlin and stood as the symbol of the Cold War division.
Checkpoint Charlie is now one of Berlin's busiest tourist locations. An open-air gallery situated along Friedrichstraße and Zimmerstraße tells the story of these streets and the violent madness of the cold war politics that forced people to risk everything to escape into the west. There is a solemnity as you read tragic story after tragic story and realise that these are events that have happened where you are standing and within the history of your own lifetime.
A portrait of an American soldier (by Rineke Dijkstra) now stands at the western end of the checkpoint. It serves as a reminder of a point in time before the trappings of western culture moved in to erode the history of these bloody streets.