History's abandoned spaces

Over the past 12 years, British artist Ian Cale has made the abandoned architecture of Berlin and the former East Germany his focus as a way of exploring the aftermath of conflict, in particular the historical caesura of the Second World War. The theme was often trivialized in the documentaries, books and films of his childhood, which presented history writ large by the victors.

Entering deserted military bases, derelict apartments and decaying institutional buildings to capture their last breaths on film, Cale sometimes finds himself in precarious situations, whether on rotting floorboards or finding unexpected inhabitants. Alert to unease, he uses this heightened state of perception to inform his search for images and emotions left behind, the residues of a past life.

On his urban explorations, Cale is searching for traces of a past life - be it fragments of peeling wallpaper, a photograph of a loved one, torn newspapers, or even greasy fingerprints. He photographs these settings and occasionally collects small and personal items from the scene that are at risk of being lost or destroyed - in the hope of giving them a new life and value.

Cale often combines these found objects and photographed scenes to form intricate, layered paintings. He uses graphic elements from a piece of wallpaper, or adds texture to evoke the peeling paint and cold damp of a cellar. "The paintings are almost a way of me trying to reinvent the memory of the experience of going around these locations. It's almost like a filter system," he explains.

Cale calls his ongoing project "Kessel - Signs of Conflict." The name was influenced by time he spent in the forest of Halbe, the site of a devastating battle between German and Soviet troops, which left tens of thousands of civilians and refugees dead. Still, Cale says his work focuses not on acts of war, but on how the results of conflict permeate everyday life.

In a darkened former mess hall in a Cold War-era military site north of Leipzig, Cale found this idyllic painted landscape. Pushing through the serving hatch, he discovered a dingy kitchen filled with a hidden treasure. In the sink, beyond a moldy bar of soap and grimy nailbrush, was a decaying envelope filled with tiny photographs of a Soviet soldier.

It was during a trip to Berlin with a group of his students that Cale made his first forays into the city’s foreboding vacant places. Exploring a former Nazi bunker turned Red Army POW camp turned nightclub, he was struck by its resemblance to a sort of Egyptian tomb. The bunker is now home to the Boros Collection of contemporary art.

Many of the urban ruins Cale documents have also become popular targets for vandals, and for graffiti artists, who often create elaborate tableaus of their own despite the disrepair. He's come to the conclusion that as an outsider, he should appreciate these new layers of history. However, out of reverence, Cale never adds his own signature to the places he visits.

While documenting poignant elements of the past, Cale is adamant that he's not nostalgic. "I'm a lot more of a realist about history and about culture, and about how people live their lives," he says. "All my job is, as far as I can say, is to chart and document places and locations before they change. Because they will change - even if you leave them alone, they will still change."

Many of the buildings that Ian Cale has documented have since been destroyed, making his images pieces of the scant evidence of their existence. He hopes to bring his art to Berlin, a city he describes as transient - despite its weighty history. "There's this feeling of wanting to make the most of something [in Berlin] because you don't know if it's going to be there next week."