Recently, the seven-member jury named the winning design in the art-in-building competition for Frankfurt (Oder) City Hall after an extensive discussion of the submitted works. Since 2019/2020, the building is being renovated and in the process developed into a transparent, open and citizen-friendly place. These renovation measures are to be flanked by a contemporary work of art. In May 2022, six artists were invited to participate in the competition for this purpose. Thus, after almost two decades, a new work of art in the public space of Frankfurt (Oder), arises again.
The focus of the competition was the work area in the new staircase to be created, which connects the various floors, the historic hall and the atrium. This forms the transition from the core building from the 13th century to the extension from 1913 and gives a particularly good indication of the long history of the building. The aim of the process was to artistically address the significance of the town hall as a central building of democratic urban society - a place where decisions on urban development have been made for centuries and which will now, even more than before, be an open forum for diverse urban society.
The winning design was the work "He who seeks, finds" by Patricia Pisani.
The site-specific installation consists of about nine objects made of silicone tubes with LED neon light diodes. Arranged as a kind of three-dimensional line drawing, the individual objects each take on a sign or symbol associated with the city of Frankfurt (Oder), its history and culture. Despite formal simplifications and the change in size in relation to the original signs, those neon light elements are easily (re)recognizable by visitors to the city hall, as they are omnipresent in the city's public space and part of the collective pictorial memory.
The jury was unanimously convinced by the idea of those signs of the installation "Who seeks, who finds", as the pictograms build a bridge between symbols of the past and the present. Moreover, the fact that the signs speak a universal, intergenerational language as well as refer in their specificity to the local history of identity was met with great resonance.
The formulation of the objects as light drawings was also positively evaluated. The radiance of the work marks an attractive and visually striking eye-catcher in the building. Other significant, partly historical neon light installations can be found on the buildings of various cultural institutions, including the Kleist Museum and the former Lichtspieltheater der Jugend, the future Frankfurt location of the BLMK. Therefore, the light installation in the town hall also holds the possibility of an aesthetic networking of different places in the city through artistic light settings.
Info
For questions about the competition and its outcome, Magdalena Scherer, coordinator visual arts and cultural promotion in the Cultural Office Frankfurt (Oder), is available.
Telephone 0335 55378335
E-mail Magdalena.Scherer@kultur-ffo.de