At a first glance, Richard Forster’s OST..! could be mistaken for a museum installation, with the space’s walls lined with some of the most iconic images of the Berlin Wall’s collapse. The centre of the gallery is filled with trinkets, products, and toys seemingly scavenged from the corpse of East Germany.
On closer inspection, all featured objects are replicas: facsimiles of items whose production lines have long ceased, reproduced in media different from their originals. Even the cardboard boxes on which the objects sit are hard cast in Jesmonite. Likewise, what initially appear to be photographs surrounding the viewer are instead photocopied images drawn in pencil. Nothing is as it seems in Forster’s exhibition of literal carbon copies.
Central to Forster’s work is the idea of Ostalgie, a portmanteau of the German words for east and nostalgia, coined to describe nostalgia felt for aspects of life under Communist rule. Several works focus on the German children’s animated programme Unser Sandmännchen, which was originally broadcast in the former GDR and continues to be shown today. Representations of the television show bring together past and present, filtered through the lens of childhood nostalgia. Nostalgia can copy and iterate upon collective memory, subtly warping how a society perceives an event over time.
Similarly, this idea is expressed through Forster’s process of reproduction itself. Images are not just reproduced in graphite, but rather photocopied and then drawn two times over, allowing for the visual defects of each step in the process to influence the final work.
Forster excellently explores the idea of Ostalgie through painstaking work with a range of different media. OST..!’s dedication to the former GDR places its symbols, media, and everyday items in an unreal stasis.
OST..! is at Edinburgh’s Ingleby Gallery until 2nd November. Entry is free
Main image: Installation view of Richard Forster’s solo exhibition, OST..!, Ingleby, Edinburgh. Photograph: John McKenzie.