Public Art Installation

The installation consists of a red park bench that is locked in an inaccessible glass cuboid as well as a text contribution.

The art installation establishes a connection between local marginalisation and exclusion phenomena and a globally interconnected world. It depicts the massive inequality of income, wealth, power and resources as the primary societal challenge.
The intervention makes invisible boundaries recognisable, points up problematic contexts and aims to encourage the adoption of critical, responsible and evaluative standpoints in discussions. It presents the freely accessible public space as a valuable commodity and thereby reveals a dystopia, in which a park bench as place and symbol of participation in urban space now only exists as an inaccessible museum piece in a glass case.

There where several reactions to the sculpture by unknown interactors: Cigarette butts and bible quotations where thrown into the cuboid through its ventilation holes, a message was glued on the glass panes and a palette of empty beer cans was put into the cuboid, whereby it was removed on the next day.

Worthy of special mention is that the about 80kg weighing bench was pulled out of the several hundred kilo weighing cuboid, to be then placed directly in front of the glass cover. While the realisation of this intervention raises some questions, nevertheless it contributed to the actual intention of the installation. (see image at bottom)

Furthermore the sculpture built a foundation for the philosophical and art theoretical event Kunstalarm1 by artist Günter Lierschof.