Dresden Peace Prize
new price sculpture
Even though the wars are over, they are far from over. The dangerous legacies of wars are still buried under the ground all over the world as a potential danger. Even during the bombing of Dresden, 10 to 15 percent of the bombs dropped were duds. In the last 75 years, tons of them have already been removed from the earth. “But we are far from being at the end of the line” says blaster Holger Klemig.
After ten years of the Dresden Prize, during which it has changed, the Friends of Dresden Deutschland e.V. association also wanted to have a new prize sculpture designed. The Dresden artist Thomas Onißeit had the idea to have the splinter of an unexploded bomb blown up by the explosive ordnance disposal for a prize sculpture melted into Plexiglas. The new prize sculpture is thus an authentic memorial against war, which in Dresden even three quarters of a century later is not really over.
Foto: Christine Starke + Thomas Onißeit
What once was does not cease to have been.
Martin Walser
Thinking about peace inevitably leads to thinking about war. Without war, we have no concept of the value of peace. And without remembrance we are without identity in the present and the future, perhaps discouraged, perhaps not able to keep the past present in an exemplary way. Disheartened in the sense that we do not act better, more peacefully, at the right time when present events require it. Every memory is like a new day that must be shaped. Everything that has happened is, as a memory, an active, new, changing experience and thus does not stop being. It therefore remains alive in the active memory.
Thomas Onißeit
1965 Born in Sachsenhausen/Weimar
1971 Weimar
1983 Erfurt, Andreasstraße
1985 Relocation to Berlin-West
2004 Dresden
Subcultural adolescence in the GDR, member of band projects (O.T.Z.E. – bass & vocals, racetrack band – wind instruments, Thanatos Wedding – drums & vocals), stonemason and stone sculptor, wall performance “The white line”, initiator and participant in painting projects in Babe and Dresden, exhibitions, 8 years art director of a Berlin direct marketing agency, author (“Turn the state into cucumber salad”, 2011), protagonist in documentary film (“Drawing lines”, 2014), since 2005 graphic designer in Dresden, since 2018 more intensive involvement with photography.
The Dresden Peace Prize is a wonderful idea. I am very moved by its symbolism.
Because of its fate, Dresden teaches us, on the one hand, to always commemorate the victims.On the other hand, it teaches us that the destruction was, in fact, the result of irresponsible politicians.
The symbol of the Prize is to stand against such politics at all times.