Germany, mon Amour!

FLATZ (Wolfgang Flatz) - Passgenau (2015)

«In Germany today, the historic dilemma Thomas Mann presented to the students at the University of Hamburg in 1953 resonates louder than ever: will it be possible to abandon the idea of a ‘German Europe’ to develop instead a ‘European Germany’, more open to the needs of other peoples? German art tries to provide an answer by disrupting the present, creating cracks in the maps of what we already know. Because if history and politics have the moral task of providing mankind with security, art takes a different path. And artistic invention of the future is primarily about creating new structures, designing utopias, exploring the imagination». Luciano Benetton

Hugo Holger Busse - Ohne Titel (oser faire qc., français = deutsch: wagen etwas zu tun, italiano: osare fare qualcosa, english: -----) (2015)

“In the end Barkow Leibinger are bricoleurs as much as they are engineers. [...] There is always an element of inspired performance in bricolage. And as the greatest philosophers in German aesthetics tell us, such play (Spiel) is also essential to art; it opens up a realm for an imaginative response to any question. In the end, this is what Barkow Leibinger offer us all: Spielraum, room for play, space for invention.” — Hal Foster

Barkow Leibinger Architekten (Frank Barkow & Regine Leibinger) - Loop Segment (2015)



“Reinhard Doubrawa explains the world” by dismembering it and turning a few selected portions of it into main characters. The techniques available for this concept are many and varied. Photography is a ubiquitous procedure, although we cannot escape the suspicion that Doubrawa is primarily interested in the cropped details, so perhaps it is a technique of release. The conceptual artist takes pictures but is not a photographer. It is not images that are wanted, but signs, which stand, if they stand for anything at all, for something absurd, in other words something ordinary. Who’s looking, after all? Cutting out from the whole is a means of visualization. Reinhard Ermen, excerpt from the catalogue text ‚ALLES“, 2011, Salon Verlag, Cologne

Norbert Bisky - Untitled (2015)



Matthias Böttger is the artistic director of DAZ (Deutsches Architektur Zentrum) in Berlin since 2011 and became a professor for Sustainable Architecture + Future Tactics (SAFT) at the Kunstuniversität Linz (Austria) in 2012. Since 2003 his Berlin based thinktank raumtaktik – office from a better future deals with spatial intelligence and interventions. In 2013 he was curator of the German contribution to the 10th Bienal de Arquitetura de São Paulo (Brazil). In 2008 he was co-curator of the German pavilion at the 11th Biennale di Venezia (Italy).

Matthias Böttger & Raumtaktik Berlin - germany.mon.amour.baukulturatlas.de (2015)



Dellbrügge & de Moll question the relationship between art and power and analyze the conditions in which art is created. Between 2001 and 2009 they worked in the space that used to be the Nazi state artist’s Staatsatelier for Arno Breker in Berlin (now named Kunsthaus Dahlem). This inspired them to go back to the national socialist roots of that place and analyze why the historical continuities and the building’s origins had been omitted or re-written for decades. In 2015, in the grounds of the Öffentlicher Raum Graz (Austria), Dellbrügge & de Moll presented an intervention called “Das Monumentale ist meine Krankheit” (The monumental is my malady).

Dellbrügge & de Moll (Christiane Dellbrügge & Ralf de Moll) - Das Monumentale ist meine Krankheit (2015)

Before founding his own firm with Karl Dudler and Pete Wellbergen in 1986, Max Dudler worked at the Oswald Mathias Ungers firm. Since 1992 he has lead his own office with branches in Berlin, Zurich (Switzerland) and Frankfurt. After several teaching assignments and visiting professorships in different cities, such as Venice and Mantua (Italy), Dortmund, Vienna (Austria), Cesena and Milan (Italy), in 2004 Max Dudler was appointed professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.

Anke Eilergerhard - Fragile! (2015)

The idea, the thought, the draft are the bases for the execution of my artwork. Ideas come from everyday life situations, social and cultural atmospheres. Then the idea expresses itself in the performances and installation art. As well as this, I use the body as a means of expression. The artistic idea is expressed using the body alone, as part of the installation and within the context of an audience. The subjects I deal with are time, movement, space, material, body, action/interaction. I try to create works of art that leave free space for associations and new possibilities for the viewer. I take a special situation from everyday life and without illustrating this one for one, I place it into a new context. I aim to create art where all of the elements are connected together to form a whole work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk). — Nezaket Ekici

Ayşe Erkmen - extension in natural (2015)



The work ironically refers to the motif of the Open Hand (La Main Ouverte) in the work of Le Corbusier. It is a recurring motif in the architect’s oeuvre as a symbol for the exchange of ideas. Against the backdrop of the work’s title “Masters of the Universe” the motif also alludes to Michelangelo’s iconic hand of God in the Sistine Chapel that completes his creation. The open hand of the deus geometra here turns into a symbol for the megalomaniacal gesture of the all determining architect and city planner. — Lukas Feireiss

Thom Barth - Batteried (northern south pole) (2015)



Ingo Günther grew up in Germany. He studied at the Universität Frankfurt and at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. His early sculptural media works and journalistic projects were pursued in TV, print, and the art field. He played a pioneering and crucial role in the evaluation and interpretation of satellite data for internationally print media and TV news. Worked as an artist, correspondent and author for German and Japanese news media. In 1989 he started the “Worldprocessor Project” and founded the first independent TV station in Eastern Europe (Channel X, Leipzig). Researches in Cambodian, Burmese and Laotian refugee camps inspired the “Refugee Republic Project” (since 1990). Currently he is adviser to New York Hall of Science, New York (USA); the Museum of Emerging Sciences and Innovation, Tokyo (Japan); adviser and artistic director of Tochoji, Tokyo’s oldest Zen Temple (Japan). Ingo Günther is a frequent contributor to “Foresight” magazine, Tokyo. He runs an office in New York.

Ingo Günther - Refugee Republic Passport Cover Ingo Günther 1995/2007 (2015)

Peter Haimerl, whose architecture office was established in Munich in 1991, questions the boundaries of architecture and urban design. He concentrates on projects, which cross the lines of conventional architecture, proposing fascinating and unconventional solutions to create innovation. To live up to this goal, he works together with experts of many different fields. In order to achieve coherent concepts, he melds his architectural view with other contexts such as computer programming, sociology, economics, politics and conceptual art.

Peter Haimerl - ARCHITECTE, ANIMOS EXCITA! Peter (2015)



What does it mean to plan? According to Aristotle, the essence of the discipline lies in foreseeing and predetermining a future end state, a telos. The primacy of telos is based on a procedure that predetermines and subordinates the various elements of a building. The architect’s basic instrument is the plan. Essential is the double sense of it, as an accurate description of the layout of a building and as a means of controlling the future. This is what is inherent to all architectural operations. A plan designs an object, unifies diverse, often contradicting, factors into one language and establishes control towards the future. A project becomes a projection thrown into the future. Though, as a pretension of stable conditions, architecture seems more and more like a built anachronism, like an inert object with serious problems of adapting to an increasingly unpredictable future. The question that we posed to ourselves on the occasion of our new project at The Land is: How to build in an epoch without a telos? How to develop a structure that can react to the unforeseen? How to plan a loss of control? — Nikolaus Hirsch

Elena Kaludova - Western Exhalator (2015)

In her series of collages Renata Kaminska gives her own take on topics such as the tense relationship of art and market/public as well as the constitution of art value and the meaning it acquires in and through contemporary societies. Kaminska is especially interested in newspapers – a basic, traditional, short-living yet still influential source of information available to a broad public – and she especially focuses on the representation of art in this medium. The collages could be seen as a phantasy about art that is emptied of any other value than the economic one, becoming a pure commodity, a sole domain of speculation of investors – pushing the limits of this devaluation even further. — Julia Wielgus