Walk Of Fame  2021

The site-specific installation "Pattern of Fame" by Nevin Aladag refers to the related "Walk of Fame" in Hollywood, but is not designed as a tourist attraction. To be precise, Aladag's 'stars' can only be seen by the pupils and teachers of the Asam-Gymnasium in Obergiesing, whereby the artist – based on the American original – creates a completely new complexity in the interplay of form and writing.

On the boulevard in Hollywood, the double connotation of the English word "star" gives an easy-to-understand message: Here, the brightest shining figures from the entertainment industry to be found on this planet are honoured, the stars, by framing their names in the symbolic form of a twinkling celestial body, a star. Nevin Aladag takes up this reduced aesthetic. Seventeen 90 x 90 cm terrazzo tiles designed by the artist were laid on the floor of the Asam-Gymnasium. They can be found in two areas of the school building: in the connecting bridge between the original building from the 1960s and the new, five-storey extension by Hirner & Riehl Architekten, as well as in an atrium of the new school building. As in Hollywood, the square panels with a black background and the central, dusky pink figure are made of terrazzo. In Aladag's work, however, both the outer edges of the large-format floor tiles and the outlines of the ornamental elements are set in brass and the respective inscriptions are not found in the pattern itself. It can be read in small capitals at the bottom right-hand edge.

The complex figures that can be found on the panels seem to cover the entire range of geometric shapes. They were collected by the artist from around the world and supplemented by patterns that the children of the Asam-Gymnasium collected in Munich's urban space. In combination with the lettering, the figures in "Pattern of Fame" appear to be transformed into symbolic representations that stand in for certain places in Munich and the world. In contrast to the Hollywood experience, however, the attribution here often comes into conflict with the expected. On closer inspection of the panels, the local and the global become intertwined. Instead of the differences, it is above all the similarities that become apparent: Perlach, Hong Kong and Calcutta - all of which are set in the square form spectrum - are conceivably close to each other. Ornaments set in circles bring Cairo and Tel Aviv within easy reach. After all, these two forms seem directly related to those found on the Munich Residenz, the Frauenkirche and in Giesing.

This is also expressed on a formal level: The insight given here into the vocabulary of forms developed by Aladag is evocative of the schematic representation of physical particles and chemical compounds and thus seems to find a suitable environment in the science and technology-oriented Asam Gymnasium. It thus becomes clear that the ornamental fragments, i.e. individual elements, removed from their context can never be representative of the whole. The Frauenkirche, Paris and Tokyo are not depicted here, but only a tiny part of these buildings and places. The overall picture, or the whole, would only be visible in the sum of all parts. However, such a combination of different elements is not only found in physics and chemistry, but also in social reality. In this way, the social body, the cultural sphere and ultimately humanity itself can also be understood as a collection of individual, different parts which, despite or precisely because of their differences, react to each other, form connections and form a whole.
(Text by Lydia Korndörfer)