KIEL.- For its second pop-up project, the Kunsthalle zu Kiel brings the feminist practice of Maruša Sagadin to the heart of Kiel's city centre, installing a newly commissioned site-specific work by the Viennese artist in the historic Alter Markt square. Located between Holstenstraße and Dänische Straße, the Alter Markt is surrounded by the few historic buildings that survived the Second World War. Since the early 1970s, the square has been dominated by a series of divisive ‘pavilions’, designed by the postwar architect Wilhelm Neveling (1908–1978) to house shops and restaurants. Here, the city's medieval history, now barely discernible, meets the contradictions of present-day commerce, with Neveling’s pavilions subject to ever-increasing rates of vacancy and disuse.

Sagadin’s new work is composed of a modular metal structure that subtly references the structural elements and modernist vernacular of the pavilions, and which provides the supporting frame from which colourful sculptures extend, hang off or wrap around. These sculptures depict motifs from the plant world and the human body, some of which also appear in the ornamentation of the historic façades that surround the square. The interplay between the existing architectural languages and a new artistic intervention, and between geometric and organic forms, opens up numerous levels of interpretation, as suggested by Sagadin’s ironic title for her work: Zwischen Barock und Romanik liegt die Botanik (Where Baroque Meets Romanesque, Botany Blooms).

In contrast to the angular, formal construction, the small sculptural objects alternate between stylistic idioms: between the comic and the grotesque, pop art and high-gloss sculpture. In turn, the installation brings together contradictory impulses: attraction and disgust, restraint and excess. Juicy, oversized fruits are found alongside fists and eyes, and droplet-like shapes stand next to floral forms. Associations of lust and power appear alongside symbols of surveillance and desire. With playfulness, intimacy and an orientation towards pleasure, Sagadin’s work breaks with the normative anonymity of consumer spaces. In her feminist reading of public space, the prominent objects—a plum and a strawberry, which Sagadin invokes as representations of female body parts or forms—become an emancipatory gesture sited in such urban environments where unwanted catcalling and other forms of sexual harassment are part of everyday life.

Formed from two tall metal towers connected by horizontal beams, Sagadin's work acts as a gate or arch that deliberately obstructs the intended flow of movement of passers-by. In Zwischen Barock und Romanik liegt die Botanik urban architecture meets art, sculpture meets painting, the constructed meets the organic, and the functional meets fantasy and emotion. In between, associative spaces emerge that must be traversed — for the residents of Kiel as well as visitors to the city.

Location: Alter Markt, 24103 Kiel, Germany

The installation can be visited free of charge at any time.