Kunstsammlung NRW
Katharina Sieverding, Foto: Wilfrid Meyer, Düsseldorf
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Sieverding's Blue Sun Shines in a Department Store Display Window

“The mysteries take place at central station,” asserted Joseph Beuys 20 years ago. Today, the mysteries “take place in a Lifestyle Store,” says Katharina Sieverding. #32 reports on a new project series launched through a collaboration between the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen and the lifestyle company Breuninger, headquartered in Stuttgart.

This internationally sought-after artist has created an almost magical work for the display window of the Breuninger fashion department store in Düsseldorf’s Kö-Bogen, a spectacular new building by star architect Daniel Libeskind. Sieverding’s projection of the deep blue, pulsating, celestial body is entitled Die Sonne um Mitternacht schauen (Viewing the Sun at Midnight), and can be seen 24 hours daily until July 5, 2014 on a screen in the display window directly at the Breuninger main entrance.

Andreas Rebbelmund (Breuninger), Hagen Lippe-Wei

A Two-Hour Projection Consisting of NASA Data

In order to shape a more than two-hour-long projection as her personal image of the sun, the Düsseldorf artist used around 100,000 pieces of data from the US space agency NASA. Powerful eruptions allow the surface of this enigmatic, hovering star – revered since time immemorial as the source of all life – to appear with continually new striations and rifts. Sieverding’s austere window display installation is flanked only by two large mirrors that reflect the changing street scene. The NASA data, discovered by the artist in cyberspace and mounted into a film, originate from the time period between 2010 and 2013; the blue projection, then, is a kind of imaginary diary of this star, so important to human survival.

The Display Window in Art from Dali to Warhol

In this work, Sieverding uses a display window for the first time after more than four decades of exhibition work, and sees herself in a tradition of artistic window display designs that extends all the way back to Duchamp via Warhol and Dali. “This public interface as an extension of museum space represented a challenge for me,” explains the multiple documenta participant, whose works are on display in major museums around the world. And for her, naturally, the polarity between art and consumerism amounts to a stimulus: “I love working in this field of tension.”

It is with “pride” that his building is the setting for the first chapter of a series of display window exhibitions planned in conjunction with the Kunstsammlung, says Andreas Rebbelmund, general manager of Breuninger in Düsseldorf. It represents an opportunity to “get away from the habitual patterns of a commercial fashion store.”

Artworks in the Bustle of the Metropolis

Marion Ackermann, director of the Kunstsammlung, is “keenly anticipating the reactions of passersby to this striking work.” Needless to add, a work of art set within the hustle and bustle of the metropolis necessarily positions itself in a very different way – especially since up to 20,000 people stroll pass by this commercial display window daily: “We look forward to this discussion with excitement.” To critics of this alliance between art and consumerism, Ackermann proffers a citation from the highly-regarded art historian Erwin Panofsky: “To be sure, commercial art runs the risk of ending up as a whore. But by the same token, noncommercial art runs the risk of ending up in old virgin.”

At the K21 of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, under the title "mal d’archive", Katharina Sieverding is showing an installation that encompasses a number of galleries, and in which her early and current works, photographs, and objects are interwoven with one another (until September 21).

Gerd Korinthenberg for #32.