Art Installations: Urban Interventions & Public Space

This subway parasite project is quite old, it was invented by Frédéric Eyl at the University of the Arts in Berlin back in 2005 (long before about 2,200 people liked Urban Art Core on Facebook), but it’s that great that I have to share it with you… Parasite is an independant projection-system that can be attached to subways and other trains with suction pads. Parasite projects films inside a tunnel. These tunnels bear something mystic – most people usually have never made a step inside any of those tunnels. Confusing the routine of your train-travelling-journey, your habits and perception the projections parallel worlds – making use of parasite – allow you a glimpse into a different world full of surrealist imagery. (thegreeneyl.com) ...

Imagine a total usual small town somewhere in the heart of Europe (in Belgium actually), a average quiet square with a big red push button and a sign with the text Push to add drama inviting people to use the button. And now watch and… …just think WTF?! ...

There’s strange things happening at the Flemish coast. This weekend, the open air art festival Beaufort04 started, transforming the Belgian coast into an enormous space for contemporary art in the public landscape. Various contemporary artist like Wim Delvoye, Ai Wei Wei and Anthony Gormley already produced their series of work during the first three editions, now it’s time for others to do the same… Isaac Cordal for example is creating a body of work called Waiting for Climate Change, consisting of several of his well-known sculptures and installations that will be exhibited on the beach of De Panne as well as in a local historic villa. In my eyes, having all these small figures in a publicly accessible area and discussing climate change at the beach is quite an interesting approach. It’s a perfect scenario for Isaac’s works! ...

Wow, this urban artists collaboration between urban design crew 44flavours and our personal hero, 3D cardboard installer Clemens Behr is like really hot sauce dripping through these rough beats of the same video… The urban illustration duo as well as Clemens (I decided to put him on my top urban artists list!) are both part of a certain new urban artists generation in Berlin, pushing forward new styles, and spreading especially their love for mixed media artworks. Filmed by Editude Pictures, they created this nice, temporary wood and cardboard installation. Good work, good guys, good sound! ...

Olek is an crochet artist. The New York-based Pole started to crochet things for friends not long ago, went on to crochet urban environment (one of the most popular one is the purple Wall Street Bull) and since then became that famous, museums are offering to buy her entire installations! And although some would describe her works as grandma-style, there’s a certain idea behind the very conceptual urban crochet artworks, as she pointed out in the accidental interview Global Street Art did with Olek a few days ago… ...

Advertisment confuse every day our choises exalting qualities that doesn’t exist and creating a sort of shame world. Today, in a moment of financial insecurity, we must discover the real value and authenticity of what we have and we need. (BR1) Italian street artist BR1 just came up with a new, inspiring and very critical street installation, presenting crumpled poster ads destroying a window of a Berlin bus shelter. This installation is not vandalism in the first place, it’s much more a creative metaphor trying to get to the bottom of today’s advert-society. It illustrates the everyday fight between ads and urban environment and it is also using a certain humorous remark and wink, what makes it a simple, but effective piece of urban artwork. ...

Graffiti room design is one of those trends, companies are using to improve their PR. The hotel Au Vieux Panier in Marseille is regularly asking artists to design one of their rooms - this time, they asked famous, self declared graffiti fetishist Tilt, who is well-known for painting onto female bodies and painted London’s Village Underground not long ago… …I first told them that I wasn’t interested doing just decoration in the room but I wanted to create something that will look more like an installation. I thought about it also as a huge canvas where I needed to think about the composition and play with the empty white part of the room to accentuate more the idea of Chaos on the other part. Then I asked my friend Tober who gat a great old school style for tags, Grizz who is also the man behind the camera and Don Cho who is a Hip Hop singer from Marseille but who used to be a tagger from my home town Toulouse. It took one week to do the whole thing cause the idea was to exaggerate what you can usually see in some abandoned places. Too much tags, too much drips, too much sentences, too much throw ups… What I also wanted to show is that people can appreciate any type of graffiti, even the more basic, it’s just a matter of point of view… ...

Back in 2011, German urban artist Clemens Behr caught up with French painter Romain Froquet in Paris to create a phenomenal collaboration installation - and when I say phenomenal, I mean it! Bringing together Clemens’ abstract, somehow digital-looking three-dimensional installations and Romain’s complex styled, abstract paintings, both artists created different, sometimes floating artworks in an old fabric using nothing more than cardboard, wood, yarn and paint… It’s great to see how the two different techniques work out together - thumbs up guys! ...

As I already told you, the first Mark Jenkins exhibition opened its doors yesterday presented by Gestalten! The famous street sculptor showed not just photos of his popular works, but also included new Jenkins sculptures made in Berlin. Furthermore, Gestalten used the artist’s Berlin residence to publish his first monograph The Urban Theater: Mark Jenkins. In addition to Mark Jenkins’s sculptural work, Glazed Paradise includes photographs of select installations that reveal how compelling the interaction between his artwork and its environment can be. (Gestalten) ...

Gestalten Publishing presents Mark Jenkins sculptures in Berlin: Gestalten is proud to present the first solo show in Germany by the renowned American artist Mark Jenkins, who uses ordinary packing tape to create life-size human or animal forms. Jenkins is best known for his clever installations of these startlingly lifelike tape sculptures in urban and natural spaces as well as indoor environments such as cafeterias, toilets, and art galleries. This expert staging of his work, especially his clothed human figures, provokes various—often strong—reactions from passersby and expands his interventions into powerful performances. ...