INTERACTIONS  (30. April – 15. Octobre 2023)

The flowing transition from the lengths of carpet, which offer new paths and thus new perspectives on the roof, to the airy hanging carpet, which approaches the ground along the façade and continues a little further there, almost flowing, is a warm invitation to our visitors to climb the stairs to the roof or vice versa. The hanging carpet thus connects two levels, above and below, the forecourt and what our architect Gustav Peichl called the ‘fifth façade’: the roof.

The hanging carpet evokes various associations. On the one hand, it creates a dialogue with the building, although its texture is very different, as the carpet is soft and basically not intended for outdoor use. This opens up a perhaps irritating interface between the private and the public spheres. On the other hand, it offers a counterpoint to the hermetic nature of the building, because, as in the Grimm fairy tale of ‘Rapunzel’, there is an unusual, purely associative way of entering the building.

Carpet as a material is an important aspect of Aladağ’s work: The traditional, exemplified by the oriental carpet – part of European culture for many centuries – is combined with the modern, exemplified by the three basketball hoops. The interweaving here is thus not only meant in the sense of the threads/fibres, but also the interweaving of the temporal and cultural levels in the sense of a visualised diversity and integration. The artist’s reading of the material as a ‘social fabric’ – not only in terms of the mechanical (runners) and manual (balls) production processes carried out by many participants – can be linked to this.

text by: Susanne Kleine