Mischa Kuball: ReferenzRäume

A high-rise building sending light signals up into the night sky above the city of Dusseldorf, a former synagogue in Stommeln radiating a dazzling light out into its surroundings, or a project with street lamps donated from all round the world as a declaration of solidarity with Christchurch after it was destroyed by an earthquake: Mischa Kuball has gained international recognition above all with striking interventions in public space.

Mischa Kuball’s installations, performances, photographs and projections explore architectural spaces and their social and political discourses primarily by means of light with all kinds of wavelengths. In doing so the artist reflects—in a dual sense—the different dimensions of cultural and historical structures. Kuball regards himself as a concept artist working in various media and spaces.

“Light is sociology, light is politics”, is how Mischa Kuball circumscribes his approach. At a time that is increasingly permeated, both in the private and the political sphere, by so called “alternative truths”, essential questions of meaning become linked with artistic interventions and their epistemological potential, as evident in several of Kuball’s works.

The exhibition and publication project entitled ReferenzRäume offers a first retrospective cross-section through Mischa Kuball’s work of the past three decades. A series of light installations, as fascinating as they are conceptually accomplished, is complemented by the presentation of pivotal projects for the public domain. Also on show are works in which Mischa Kuball engages with the foundations of modernism, as well as the large multimedia work New Pott in which the artist tells about the people in the Ruhr District today, a region now shaped by migration.

In projects that are both site-specific and socio-politically motivated (the work series “public preposition”) Mischa Kuball examines public spaces, questions our perception of apparently familiar surroundings and creates vexatious moments. For his work Leverkusen_transfer he laid out in front of Leverkusen Town Hall the ground plan of Museum Morsbroich’s first exhibition space so that people could step on it, use it as a place for performances or a place of reflection, and that at a time when the continuation of Museum Morsbroich was a topic of highly controversial debate.

Since 2007 Mischa Kuball (born 1959 in Dusseldorf, where he also lives) is professor in Germany of public art /Kunst im öffentlichen Raum, at the KHM Kunsthochschule für Medien in Cologne. He is also associated professor for media art at the Hochschule für Gestaltung / ZKM Karlsruhe.

The exhibition and publication project Mischa Kuball. ReferenzRäume initiated by the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, is being prepared in close collaboration with the artist and realized in cooperation with the Museum Morsbroich in Leverkusen.

The exhibition and publication project Mischa Kuball. ReferenzRäume is generously supported by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, the Kunststiftung NRW, and the Stiftung Kunstfonds.

The accompanying German-English publication (edited by Andreas Beitin, Holger Broeker, and Fritz Emslander) is the first comprehensive compendium of Mischa Kuball’s work since 2007. An image section designed by the artist opens up connections between the works and gives the publication the character of an artist’s book. The texts by Lilian Haberer, Daniel Horn, Christina Irrgang, Vanessa Joan Müller, and Marcus Steinweg offer a profound examination of central aspects and themes in the work of Mischa Kuball.