Karin Sander White Passageways (Weiße Passagen), Ulica Piotrkowska, Łódź, 1990

Karin Sander's photograph documents one of her early urban interventions that was executed in conjunction with the 1990 “Construction in Progress"--an annual arts festival conceived and organized by the Polish artist Ryszard Waśko that took place in various cities between 1981 and 2000. The intervention entailed painting two passage ways white. As the sociologist and art writer Harald Welzer noted about the project: "Two house passages in the city of Lodz are freed from the burden of the past: the cracks in their walls are meticulously filled and they are then painted white. This work is a comment on the transitory nature of the social situation in Poland at the beginning of the 1990s – on the way, history is continually being wiped out and ever new structures created. The house passages are thus passageways in a double sense. On the one hand they link past, present and future; and on the other they are brightly lit incisions into the dull, grey house facades that – like unkept promises – lead into equally dull, grey courtyards."

After the exhibition ended, the passage ways remained painted but no efforts were made to preserve them. Subsequently, the painted sections became once more indistinguishable from and absorbed by the city.