Mischa Kuball: Agora / Arena

Exploring architectural and urban spaces with light, inspiring social and political debate, addressing complex issues with simple technique: this is the art of Mischa Kuball. »I am interested in the public as a laboratory,« he says about his artistic strategies. The Düsseldorf media artist’s installation Agora/Arena for the outside of Jahrhunderthalle is simultaneously a search for hidden traces and a form of cultural anthropology. Agora/Arena invites spectators and saunters alike to use and thus actively transform the area in front of the Jahrhunderthalle into a place for communication. In the early 1970s, the artist couple Bernd and Hilla Becher were the first to anchor industrial structures in public awareness as autonom sculptures with their photographic works. Their visionary and emphatic depictions of these ›cathedrals of industrial culture‹ revealed them as the ruins of a post-industrial society that was about to let the traces of its history disappear. Mischa Kuball sees his own work as referring to this revelatory act, continuing it in a new way. His works oscillate between »clearingand illumination« (Peter Sloterdijk)