Art Installations: Urban Interventions & Public Space

Curated by 44flavours and Clemens Behr the group installation The Solution Is Irrelevant will take place tonight at Berlin’s Epicentro Artspace, Karl-Marx-Allee 82-84! Urban Multimedia Art The Solution Is Irrelevant, is meant to evoke not only an approach to creativity and the act of creating, but also a life philosophy. For the duration of the vernissage, the Epicentro Artspace will be transformed into a multimedia, interdisciplinary laboratory, where performance and video art, design, music, spoken word, sound treatment, sculpture, painting, and installations will interact simultaneously without a screenplay or a preset agenda. On board for the experiment: the 44flavours art collective, installation artist Clemens Behr, film directors Pol Ponsarnau and Yves Kasten, musicians Robot Koch, Sneaky and Lars Kirchbach, and spoken word artist RQM. The entire “performance” will be documented on video and will be screened at Epicentro art daily; presented in the form of video installations alongside other finished artifacts. ...

For today the proclamation of sentence for the three arrested Pussy Riot activists Maria Alekhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Ekaterina Samucevich is announced, for what reason there are several solidarity events taking place around the world. In Berlin, the street art collective Mentalgassi (here in Spain), recently put up one of their well-known urban faces, this time showing one of those famous Pussy Riot woolen masks… Pussy Riot is an anonymous Russian feminist performance art group formed in October 2011. Through a series of peaceful performances in highly visible places, the group has given voice to basic rights under threat in Russia today, while expressing the values and principles of gender equality, democracy and freedom of expression contained in the Russian constitution and other international instruments, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the CEDAW Convention. (about Pussy Riot) ...

Bosso Fataka, that is a group of four Berlin-based artists, being well-known in town for using cling wrap as adhesive to turn trash into sculptures in public spaces. Recently, the world’s largest international multimedia news agency Reuters did a nice video feature on them, entitled Berlin artists turn trash into sculpture… Their pieces remain no longer than a couple of weeks, until municipal workers remove them, leaving photographs on their Facebook page as the sole documentation of their activity. ...

Remember the yarn-bombed Wall Street Bull? Now, Polish street artist Olek struck again when she covered the almost 9 meters tall memorial statue of Albert Einstein at the National Academy of Science in Washington DC! Unfortunately, the city cleaned the yarn-bombed Einstein within hours… Olek says Einstein, for her, was an easy choice since he was such a creative thinker himself. “I thought he might have a sense of humor about it,” she says. […] Presumably this kind of thing is par for the course when you’re a guerrilla yarn-bomber. (Washingtonian) ...

It’s been a long time, since the last Urban Art Link-Tips literary came into the world… the latest are from back in December 2011. Nevertheless, I really like the idea of giving a short overview about things that happened during the last weeks and didn’t made it into the Urban Art Core stream! Here we go… - **Ever**, one of the best young muralists in South America, just posted that pretty [video of his recent trip to Mexico](http://blog.vandalog.com/2012/07/video-ever-in-mexico/). - [Urban artist **Vinz**](/usual-misdeeds-vinz-austria/) recently created this very nice [*Don’t Be Afraid*](http://urbanshit.de/?p=8934) mural in his home-town Valencia... …and also my French friend Shaka put up a new mural in Melun, France! ...

Famous German 3D graffiti artist Mirko Reisser aka DAIM, who is well-known also from posters and TV, just spent a day at a beach. Probably because the sun was long in coming, DAIM started to build his version of a proper drip castle - a sand graffiti showing his name in his well-known three-dimensional style… On his own admission, it took him 6 hours to build this great, but still somehow unsteady letter sculpture. Whereas it just took 30 minutes for the sea to destroy it again. For that reason, you maybe could call this result of a graffiti maestro playing at the beach a temporary sand graffiti installation or just an urban sandcastle! ...

Berlin’s creative studio Cheesecake Powerhouse just came up with a new urban intervention: They installed street lamp light switches in public space! And although that’s not suitable for the mass, it’s in my opinion a brilliant idea, especially for smaller neighbourhoods, parks or almost uninhabited urban areas… The Cheesecake Powerhouse was founded 2012 in Berlin by Chehad Abdallah, Eugenio Perazzo, Fabian Greitemann and Julian Stahl and usually operates in various design disciplines. Nevertheless, they work with people coming from all kinds of disciplinary backgrounds like video production, copywriting, strategy, skateboarding, graffiti or digital, what becomes visible in that recent street lamp light switch installation. So what’s next? ...

Looks like companies are going a step further with their urban art ad campaigns. After using stencils for guerrilla advertising, paying graffiti artists to paint some backdrops or planning large action street theater, they are now willing to let their ad agencies install impressing advert sculptures… Belgian paint manufacturer Levis (Akzo Nobel) recently came up with an urban guerrilla paint sculpture! The installation, planned and created by Belgian ad agency King George, consists of an XXL Levis paint pot mounted onto an existing lamppost eight metres above the ground so it appears to be floating. The post itself has been painted red, creating a stream of paint that looks like it is coloring the car park where it is situated, as was described on designboom.com. ...

During the Katowice Street Art Festival in Poland, popular urban artist Nawer (remember his great collaboration with Graphic Surgery?) teamed up again with the motion graphic artists of Temporary Space Design and created a pretty great multimedia installation! Like other projects they did together, this installation explores space in two dimensional graphics. The attempt to breathe life into an image and bring a sense of motion and dynamic to a static form is in my opinion a really interesting approach, allowing to create impressing results as you can see in the video documenting also parts of the progress. ...

With a 15 meters high Space Invader game, urban installation artist Luke Egan aka Filthy Luker just invaded Manchester! Made of road work barriers and traffic cones the Space Invader game is fully interactive - the required software comes from Jnr Hacksaw - what makes it becoming something like a center of attraction in the city of Manchester… The project is a work in progress and under deconstruction, coming to some scaffolding near you soon! ...