Kurt-Kurt

In the page's words:

The Kurt-Kurt project space

"Kurt-Kurt | Kunst und Kontext im Stadtlabor Moabit" is an art project that deals explicitly with exemplary selected situations in the urban space of Moabit and in Berlin, consciously locating itself here and sharpening the view of the details on site as well as opening the view to and from the outside in order to perceive and reflect on art in a larger and international context. Kurt-Kurt examines, pursues and illuminates strategies and developments in the examination of the public and urban space. The interventions and presentations of the Kurt-Kurt project are a place for exchange and encounters between art and everyday life, urban space and project space, model and reality and always also between international art audiences and local residents as well as between artists and art recipients. The changes in local, national and global politics, in society and in the media require unprecedented artistic interventions, collaborations and the development of new strategies. The projects at Kurt-Kurt provide impulses for working out and exploring these together during a dialog based on art, overcoming resistance, using potentials through the encounter of artists with cross-media and cross-disciplinary backgrounds: collaboration and exchange are initiated, art and artists are presented, interdisciplinary encounters take place, constructive discussions are stimulated, possibilities of a socially transformative process are discussed.
Kurt-Kurt initiates political debates with the aim of overcoming the division into "them" and "us". It is an attempt to appropriate the space for a temporary public sphere: looking, thinking, speaking and working as a communal experience.

Kurt-Kurt, a project space with feedback

Kurt-Kurt realizes and presents a wide variety of projects and exhibition series by internationally active artists that make references to Moabit and Berlin. Kurt-Kurt is a meeting place for local and global experiences, for discussions, encounters and a starting point for new networks and collaborations.
Kurt-Kurt's projects in the field of tension between art presentation, artistic interventions and art discourse are always designed to stimulate and initiate conversation and communication between a culturally relevant specialist audience, the neighborhood and local and international artists.
An intensive educational program accompanying the respective projects with discussions, artist talks, lectures, readings, dinner lectures and workshops is an essential part of our work. The question of how public spaces and the public sphere can be temporarily reopened and occupied as a counter-movement to privatization and economization through artistic interventions and reactions is one of the central questions of the Kurt-Kurt project.

Looking, looking back and looking ahead: Perspectives of the Kurt-Kurt project space

Being there, taking a seat, thinking aloud, starting and, above all, working visibly play a significant role in the communication of our artistic concepts beyond the everyday economy of survival. In addition to developing artistic ideas, we are concerned with consciously engaging with an urban, constantly changing reality that represents and demands more than just an exotic difference to the world of high culture. With an overarching perspective, Kurt-Kurt's project series take on Berlin-specific themes and place them in an international context.
Our activities are about the local view with an international impact and the international view with a local impact. The artistic work that moves in this field of tension manifests itself in cross-media and cross-disciplinary projects, which as individual presentations have a temporary character, but as thematically overarching project series enable longer-term discussions, participatory experiences and encounters with artistic working methods.

In 2021, the Kurt-Kurt project space will be fifteen years old. After learning to walk quickly, visibly, professionally and on an international footing in its first four years with projects in the public space of Moabit, it has remained true to its claim in the following years with its exhibition projects, thematic series, festivals, discussions in the context of art and context in Stadtlabor Moabit, In addition to collaborating and exchanging ideas with his immediate surroundings, he has always worked internationally and cooperated with artists beyond the city and national borders.

Kurt-Kurt, a project space with a continuous presence in a historically charged location

The Kurt-Kurt project center in Kurt Tucholsky's birthplace is a contact point for visitors and is located in a building that houses the inhabited present together with the remembered history of the poet Kurt Tucholsky, for whom the close connection to the everyday reality of life in his surroundings was essential for dealing with political and social issues. Tucholsky, this great critical and constructive spirit of the last century with his political commitment and ironic humor, is both an incentive and a challenge for us in our projects.
The role of the Kurt-Kurt project space is defined in such a way that this space is understood both as an exhibition space and as the starting point and organizational nucleus of various international art projects in the Moabit/Berlin/World field of action. The individual projects originate here and are repeatedly tied back to it in terms of content and organization. This connection to a locatable place, the continuous presence and contactability of organizers and project participants for the interested public is one of the important basic requirements for our work.

Kurt-Kurt | Lübecker Str. 13 | 10559 Berlin | Tel +49 30 397 46 942 | info @ kurt-kurt.de

The Kurt-Kurt initiators and curators Simone Zaugg and Pfelder

In addition to their artistic activities, Simone Zaugg and Pfelder have been producing and curating international art projects at various locations in Europe for over twenty-five years, which deal explicitly with urban, suburban and landscape environments, the public sphere and public space. They thematize the feedback between interior and exterior, between art space and public space.
As artists, Pfelder (www.pfelder.de) and Simone Zaugg (www.simonezaugg.net) have been successfully realizing context- and situation-specific works in public space for many years and regularly exhibit internationally in art institutions.