ART-PRESENTATION: Mischa Kuball-Referenz Räume
The Conceptual artist Mischa Kuball, has been working in the public and institutional sphere since 1977. He uses light as a medium to explore architectural spaces as well as social and political discourses and reflects on a whole variety of aspects from sociocultural structures to architectural interventions as well as emphasizing or reinterpreting their monumental nature and context in architectural history.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg
Since 2007 Mischa Kuball has been a Professor for public art at the Academy of Media Arts, Cologne, and associate professor for media art at Hochschule für Gestaltung/ZKM, Karlsruhe. Since 2015 he has been a member of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts, Duesseldorf. In 2016 he was honoured with the German Light Award. In an era increasingly permeated by so-called “alternative facts” in both the private and political spheres, the artist Mischa Kuball in his solo exhibition “ReferenzRäume” poses central questions of meaning. He reveals social modes of action and political discourses, which, through his works, are simultaneously subjected to revision. To this end, he collated, for example, the office lighting of a high-rise building at night to form light patterns that question everyday energy consumption in the nocturnal skyline, or let a paper-thin rescue blanket be blown by the wind through streets or landscapes, the lightness and fragility of which is reminiscent of the instability and finiteness of human life. The exhibition has a retrospective character and presents for the first time a cross-section of Kuball’s work of the last three decades, including large-scale installations, photographs, video projections, documentations, etc. from the work complex public preposition. Kuball sees himself as a conceptual artist working in various media and spaces. The exhibition presents his fundamental ideas with a selection of succinct works. A series of large and fascinating installations thus combine the use of light with a reflection on social, political, and scientific issues. Works created especially for Wolfsburg or placed in a new context enhance the exhibition with current socio-political references. The architecture and the immediate surroundings of the museum buildings also are incorporated into the exhibition.
Photo: Mischa Kuball, ReferenzRäume, Installation view Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg- Wolfsburg, 2021, Courtesy the artist and Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg
Info: Curator: Dr. Holger Broeker, Curatorial Assistance: Birte Hinrichsen and Dino Steinhof, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Hollerplatz 1, Wolfsburg, Germany, Duration: 8/5-19/9/2021, www.kunstmuseum.de
