An-Bau
Adam Kraft
Installation/intervention
2019
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Adam Kraft’s artistic practice involves the dualism of changing reality while disappearing. His installations infiltrate public spaces by repurposing the forgotten fifth corner of the room, outfitting it into a homely and safe refuge. Adam’s gift to his audience (no matter how small) is to open up livable possibilities against the background of neoliberal capitalist urban development. His „an-architectures“ foster urban myths and imaginaries of real-life miniature Utopias.
For Owned by Others, Adam will expand on the documentation and dissemination of his already vanished undertaking An-Bau—the unruly hinterland of a faux facade. Over the course of several months the artist scavenged scrap material in the streets to construct a secret refuge within the scaffolding surrounding the original site of the Berliner Bauakademie. The original building by Karl Friedrich Schinkel had been erected in 1836 and was destroyed in 1945. It presaged the principles of modern architecture by adhering to strict functionality and is destined to be reconstructed in the coming years. As if longing for “authentic” renewal, an advertisement for the reconstruction fitted the former site of the building with a giant poster mimicking the building’s facade between 2004 and 2019.
Starting from the clandestine architecture of his bird’s nest behind the „Baumaske“ Adam investigated the potential of the unruly in the very „heartland“ of Berlin, e.g. by starting an inventory of the local flora and fauna. The durational intervention, which is documented here, also raises questions on authenticity, historicity, and social usage of prestigious sites in the metropolis. Berlin’s pursuit to remold its fractured past into continuity is subverted by an invitation which offers space to live, to study, and to contemplate—for all the world to see yet out of sight.