Kurt-Kurt

"Kurt-Kurt | Kunst und Kontext im Stadtlabor Moabit" is an art project that explicitly engages with selected situations in the urban space of Moabit and Berlin. It deliberately locates itself here, sharpening the view of local details while also opening the view from and towards the outside in order to perceive and reflect on art in a larger, international context.

Kurt-Kurt investigates, follows and illuminates strategies and developments in the engagement with publicness and urban space. Its interventions and presentations are places of exchange and encounter between art and everyday life, urban space and project space, model and reality, and always also between international art audiences and residents as well as between artists and recipients.

Changes in local, national and global politics, society and media require new artistic interventions, cooperations and strategies. Kurt-Kurt gives impulses for these processes: collaboration and exchange are initiated, art and artists are presented, interdisciplinary encounters take place, constructive discussions are stimulated and possibilities of social change are discussed.

Kurt-Kurt initiates political debates with the aim of overcoming the division into "they" and "we". It is an attempt to appropriate space for a temporary publicness: looking, thinking, speaking and working as a shared experience.

## A Project Space With Feedback Loops

Kurt-Kurt realizes and presents diverse projects and exhibition series by internationally active artists who establish connections to Moabit and Berlin. Kurt-Kurt is a meeting point for local and global experiences, discussions and encounters, and a starting point for new networks and cooperations.

The projects of Kurt-Kurt, situated between art presentation, artistic intervention and art discourse, are always designed to stimulate conversation and communication between cultural specialist audiences, the neighborhood and local as well as international artists.

An intensive mediation program accompanying the respective projects—including discussions, artist talks, lectures, readings, dinner lectures and workshops—is an essential part of the work. One central question of Kurt-Kurt is how public spaces and publicness can be temporarily reopened and occupied through artistic interventions as a countermovement to privatization and economization.

## Looking, Looking Back and Looking Ahead

Being there, taking a place, thinking aloud, beginning and above all visible work play an important role in communicating artistic concepts beyond everyday survival economies. In addition to developing artistic ideas, the work is about consciously engaging with an urban, constantly changing reality.

With an overarching perspective, Kurt-Kurt’s project series take up Berlin-specific themes and place them in an international context. The focus is on the local view with international effect and the international view with local effect. This artistic work manifests in cross-media and interdisciplinary projects that have a temporary character as individual presentations and enable long-term engagement, participatory experiences and encounters with artistic working methods as thematic project series.

In 2021 the project space Kurt-Kurt turned fifteen. After learning to walk quickly, visibly, professionally and internationally in its first four years with projects in Moabit’s public space, it remained true to its claim in the following years with exhibition projects, thematic series, festivals and discussions within Kunst und Kontext im Stadtlabor Moabit: locating art in the surrounding urban space, addressing people from the neighborhood and acting internationally alongside collaboration with the immediate environment.

## A Historically Charged Place

The Kurt-Kurt project headquarters in the birthplace of Kurt Tucholsky is a contact point for visitors and is located in a building that contains inhabited present and remembered history at the same time. Tucholsky, the great critical-constructive spirit of the last century with his political engagement and ironic humor, is an incentive and challenge for Kurt-Kurt’s projects.

The project space Kurt-Kurt is understood both as an exhibition space and as the starting point and organizational nucleus of various international art projects in the field Moabit/Berlin/world. This connection to a findable place, the continuous presence and accessibility of organizers and project participants for the interested public, is one of the important foundations of the work.

## Simone Zaugg and Pfelder

In addition to their artistic practice, Simone Zaugg and Pfelder have produced and curated international art projects at various locations in Europe for more than twenty-five years, explicitly engaging with urban, suburban and landscape environments, publicness and public space. They address feedback loops between interior and exterior, art space and public space.

As artists, Pfelder (www.pfelder.de) and Simone Zaugg (www.simonezaugg.net) have for many years successfully realized context- and situation-specific works in public space and regularly exhibit internationally in art institutions.