BERLIN.- Bettina Pousttchi is the fifth artist to develop a site-specific work for the twenty-metre-high Kesselhaus at the KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art. The interventions show an impressive range of artistic responses to the space: After Roman Signer with his nose-diving airplane Kitfox Experimental, David Claerbout with the thousand-year real-time projection Olympia, Haegue Yang with her centrally hung Venetian blind installation Silo of Silence – Clicked Core, and Thomas Scheibitz’s multi-part sculpture Plateau mit Halbfigur standing in the middle of the room, Bettina Pousttchi has installed her work Panorama directly on the walls of the Kesselhaus.

In her works, Bettina Pousttchi often refers to the urban and historical context of a place and works in public spaces. For instance, in 2009 and 2010 she covered the entire facade of the Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin with the photo installation Echo, which referred to the recently demolished Palast der Republik. Using archival images of the building, she was not interested in creating a faithful reconstruction or simulation; rather, Pousttchi’s intervention in the urban space created a succinctly reduced, hazy afterimage and evoked individual memories.

In the Kesselhaus at the KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art, Bettina Pousttchi once again works with photography in the dimensions of architecture and has realised her largest photographic installation in an interior space to date. Panorama consists of eight floor-to-ceiling photographic prints distributed across the three windowless walls of the Kesselhaus. The starting point is photographs taken by the artist, which show a view through the enormous windowed facade of the Kesselhaus to the space outside, of neighbouring buildings, the beer garden, bicycles, etcetera. At a scale of 1:1, the textile photo prints multiply the narrow, grid-shaped windows.

The word “panorama” commonly refers to a 360-degree view. But Pousttchi’s Panorama undermines the expectation of a homogeneous photographic space and instead aims for an imagined whole. The enormous photographic prints cannot be viewed simultaneously, but must be read in fragments dictated by the field of view. Pousttchi’s site-specific photographic installation shows the immediate environment as a world in its discontinuity—interior and exterior space are blurred; reality and photography are simultaneously shifted and interconnected. The resulting architectural transparency and the democratisation of perspective demand an awareness of one’s own location.

The exhibition is curated by Andreas Fiedler.

Bettina Pousttchi (*1971 in Mainz, lives in Berlin). Solo exhibitions at the Arts Club of Chicago (2017), the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. (2016), the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas (2014), the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (2012), and the Kunsthalle Basel (2011), among others.