Stadt durch Glas (City thru Glass)

1995 ff.

The video collage CITY THROUGH GLASS (MOSCOW/DÜSSELD0RF/MOSCOW) has a long history in Kuball's work, which needs to be briefly recapitulated. Since 1995, five different work and presentation forms of STADT DURCH GLAS have been created in the media of photography and video. All of the works use cityscapes shot with a moving camera from a moving car. The special feature of the images lies in a deliberate intervention that alienates the camera's optics: during the shots, a standard drinking glass was mounted in front of the lens at the respective location, resulting in a calculated “image disturbance” - the prismatic fragmentation and distortion of the image. In 1995, the video STADT DURCH GLAS/DÜSSELDORF was made during a car journey from the artist's studio on Fürstenwall to the Konrad Fischer Gallery in Platanenstraße. The video was first shown there in 1996 under the title STADT DURCH GLAS/SIEH DURCH MEINE AUGEN in an installation consisting of two monitors mounted high up. Still images from the video formed the basis of wall panels, which Kuball used to create an ensemble that has been permanently installed in the corridors and treatment rooms of the Neurosurgery Clinic in Krefeld since 1999. The landscape-format photographs are complemented by portrait-format mirrors, which allow the place and the moving people to become a permanently changing part of the work. In 1997, Kuball produced the New York version of STADT DURCH GLAS, which was shown in 2000 as part of the exhibition XX. Jahrhundert. A Century of Art in Germany under the title CITY THRU GLASS/N.Y. NIGHT VERSION at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. In 2002, the Kunstmuseum Bonn acquired the New York video and projected it in the collection at the same time as the presentation of two large-format light boxes with individual images from CITY THROUGH GLASS on the north and west facades of the museum.

CITY THROUGH GLASS (MOSCOW/DÜSSELDORF/MOSCOW) was created in connection with the state presentation of North Rhine-Westphalia in Moscow in June 2003. The artist took the state's invitation to the exhibition in a Moscow art institution as an opportunity to create a new, one-hour video version of CITY THROUGH GLASS, in which daytime footage from the Düsseldorf video was combined with daytime and nighttime footage from Moscow (twenty minutes each) in a double projection. The State Tretyakov Gallery at Krymsky Val was won as a cooperation partner. Kuball's initiative took place during an institutionally explosive phase at the Tretyakov Gallery, which the artist skillfully incorporated into his exhibition planning. Thanks to the commitment of the curator for contemporary art, Andrei Yerofeyev, it was possible to prepare new rooms for Kuball's exhibition, which have since been available to Russian non-conformist art and new media art, which until then had had no presence in the Tretyakov's collection rooms.