Berlin Floater 2019 marks the first solo exhibition of Mischa Kuball at Daniel Marzona, Berlin.

For this special project, Kuball re-enacts his “performance without audience,“ originally created during his residency at Donald Judd’s Chinati Foundation at the former military base in Marfa, Texas. Developed as a video installation, “performance without audience“ shows an emergency blanket, made of polyester and aluminum, as it is carried through exterior and interior spaces by the wind as well as air currents coming from a fan. Moving through the air, the blanket appears light as a feather, nearly immaterial, with its reflective surface visually incorporating the various surroundings and light conditions it encounters. The occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, and first Moon landing, adds metaphorical significance to Mischa Kuball’s contemplation on infinite space and his conceptual approach to land art.

Recreating the piece in Daniel Marzona’s gallery space in Berlin, “performance without audience“ shifts its location from rural Texas to central Berlin, a completely urban setting, encompassing both the gallery as well as the streets and the immediate public area surrounding it. The resulting installation includes videos and drawings that will be on view from June 21st, 2019. A conceptual artist, Mischa Kuball has been working in the public and institutional sphere since 1977. Using light as a medium, his work explores architectural spaces and connects them with social discourses, merging the public and the private spheres in order to initiate communication between the audience, the artist, the work itself and the public. His participatory projects are often politically motivated, emphasizing sociocultural structures and reinterprating them in the context of architectural history.

„Marfa Floater silver/gold, Marfa“ belongs to a series of site-specific installations entitled “public preposition“ that Mischa Kuball has been developing since 2009 – a group of works, interventions, projects and performances that address the notion of “public“ and its definition in contemporary art. Recognizing that public art has undergone a substantial change since the 1970s, “public preposition“ analyses the relationship between historical sites and their social, political or communal specificity, and seeks to extend our perception of familiar urban environments.

Mischa Kuball (*1959, Düsseldorf) lives and works in Düsseldorf. In 2007 he was appointed Professor for Public Art at the Academy of Media Arts, Cologne, and Associate Professor for Media Art at Hochschule für Gestaltung/ZKM, Karlsruhe. A member of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts since 2015, he was awarded the German Light Award in 2016. His work has been shown extensively, both nationally and internationally, most recently at the Jewish Museum Berlin, Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig, and the Goethe Zentrum in Baku.