Picture: Marcus Veigel
To mark the 100th anniversary of the Dehio-Handbook of German cultural monuments, its editors staged this exhibition in cooperation with the State Art Collections of Dresden. With a view to the guidelines formulated by Georg Dehio around 1900, it examined the background to modern practice in the protection of monuments from its beginnings in the early 19th century to the present day. By showing numerous original objects and on the basis of projects to preserve monuments all over Germany, an attempt was made to formulate a standpoint regarding contemporary practice in the preservation of monuments. In face of the changeable conditions influencing the preservation of monuments in Germany history, it became clear that the preservation of monuments always operates at the interface between science, society and politics.
The exhibition location represented a particular challenge, but also an opportunity for its realisation: the second floor, not restored as yet, and the renovated royal chapel of the former palace residence in Dresden. Here, there was an opportunity to visualise the building itself as an exhibition object directly concerned with the preservation of monuments; the time layers of preservation could be linked to this large-scale exhibit in a very concrete way. The exhibition architecture for more than 1,500 original exhibits was rather severe, reduced to a limited spectrum of colours, retaining a distance to the existing palace architecture and thus creating a space in which the precious loans could unfold fully.