Wende Museum - General Admission
Friday, August 8, 2025
Check out a list of these exhibitions below:
Counter/Surveillance: Control, Privacy, Agency
The exhibition Counter/Surveillance traces the historical roots of such surveillance devices and methods, and the Cold War dynamics that shaped and spread them. It explores the precursors of current biometric surveillance in Cold War manuals for police, border guards and spies; in forensic portraiture; and in the little-known early history of computer facial recognition, revealing links between forensics, science, art, and popular culture. It also traces similarities between Cold War surveillance devices and methods used in East and West, from miniature cameras and listening devices to forensic composite kits. These not only point to a shared technical history, but are also indicative of exchange, inspiration, and imitation across the Iron Curtain. Technical exchanges with allies in the Global South ensured further international dissemination.
Intersections: The Architecture of Victor Adegbite and Charles Polónyi in Ghana
Intersections traces the collaboration of two architects who responded to that call: Ghanaian Victor Adegbite (1925–2014) and Hungarian Charles Polónyi (1928–2002). Polónyi arrived in Accra as part of Eastern European technical assistance programs supporting Ghana’s transition to socialism. He worked for the Ghana National Construction Corporation, where Adegbite—a Howard University graduate—served as chief architect. In their work at the GNCC, they mobilized architectural resources from the socialist, capitalist, and non-aligned countries and designed buildings that responded to Ghana’s needs, means, and aspirations.
The exhibition centers on the housing projects designed by Adegbite and Polónyi, which embodied the many dimensions of independence—from representing a new elite to the state’s provision of housing for all social groups. By juxtaposing family archives from the United States and Hungary—preserved by the architects’ daughters—the exhibition both reconstructs and reenacts an encounter from sixty years ago. By recording how the buildings designed by Adegbite and Polónyi have been appropriated by their inhabitants, it shows how the architects’ work continues to impact Accra’s urban landscapes.
Anton Roland Laub: Mobile Churches in Ceausescu’s Bucharest
Ceaușescu is particularly ruthless in his treatment of religious sites. Nevertheless, seven churches are spared and subjected to a process as incredible as it is absurd: they are lifted and placed on rails, then moved and hidden behind housing blocks, while several other sacred buildings, such as the Polish Synagogue, are surrounded and thus masked by imposing panel buildings. Withdrawn from the cityscape, isolated in the interstices of the disparate architecture that shapes Bucharest’s urban landscape today, they lead secret lives, precariously harboring unresolved memories.
Combining recent photographs by the artist with archival material, Mobile Churches is a critical and artistic inventory that aims to reveal a dramatic and little-known chapter in the urban and political evolution of the Eastern Bloc.
Enrique Martínez Celaya: The Sextant
The installation The Sextant is a smaller-scale recreation of the house, which will serve as an embodiment of the cultural, architectural, and emotional responses to the Cold War in the Caribbean. The aspect of recreation, re-staging, and artifice of the installation is critically meaningful. The model of the house shines a light on the question of authenticity as well as the gap between what is reality and what is a dream, and reveals tensions that are present in all our lives but have a particularly profound relevance to the experience of those who lived in communist countries during the Cold War.
Moreover, the installation explores concepts such as the interiority of memory, the self refracted through the experience of home, and the mysterious, painful, and radiant world of childhood. It also investigates the relationship between lived experience and memory, the way a work of art negotiates the distance between witness and participant, and selfhood that is, at least in part, otherness.
Upcoming Dates
- Fri, Mar 20, 2026 All Day
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- +127 future events
Hours
The Wende Museum offers free admission to all visitors. No tickets or reservations are required for general entry. The museum is open Friday, Saturday, and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. For group tours or special events, please contact the museum in advance.