Viewers of Lisi Raskin’s new installation “Parallel Telegram” are half reminded of the paranoid atomic bunker architecture of the Cold War, half of the monstrous rocket silos of that epoch. It is only possible to enter Studio 4 of the Künstlerhaus through a tunnel; it captures the visitor in a dizzying world of artificial light and transports him to a place somewhere between the power-mad fantasies of the super powers and today’s technological planning games, generating a feeling of claustrophobia.

Lisi Raskin spent years researching this chronicle from the domain of science fiction created by the contrivers of the apocalypse. She grew up during the eighties, when a final atomic age was constantly being conjured up, remaining a disturbing fantasy in films such as “The Day After”, but almost becoming reality in the atomic catastrophe of Chernobyl. The artist travelled as far as Lithuania in order to study the legacy of the Soviet technological empire at the atomic power station “Ignalina”. She also examined bunker systems such as those in Kossa and Freudenberg, which aimed to prolong man’s survival briefly in the nuclear desert after the onset of atomic war.

In her Berlin installation, this basis develops into a narrative about the order and set-up of a world on the threshold to destruction. Here emergency exit doors prove fakes, and the emergency stop device to prevent the premature launching of a cruise missile is a folklorist, non-functioning dummy. Lisi Raskin describes a Wonderland of omnipotence mania, but it turns out to be an astonishingly close copy of real catastrophes and thus a realistic, distorting mirror image of our own environment.