“inside_out a sugarcube installation” 2002 in the house of E.ON Energie

Following in the footsteps of the writer and Nobel Prize winner V. S. Naipaul, the well-known Munich sculptor Nele Ströbel tapped into the island of Trinidad with her passion for polarities. In 1996, she photographed a picturesque street corner in Port of Spain. The once magnificent houses there, which were still inhabited, had fallen into such disrepair that their walls became a translucent membrane, as it were, revealing private things.

This photograph was integrated into a large-format spatial work with the help of digital processing. “inside_out a sugarcube installation” alludes with its proportions to a sugar cube whose inner walls mirror the Caribbean motif. This creates a walk-in shelter within the public exhibition space, which allows the visitor a kind of privacy.

In her latest work, Ströbel addresses the fluid boundaries between private and public space. This dialectic also characterizes the architecture of the building on Brienner Strasse, in whose centerpiece, a piazza visible from all sides, the cube will float.

In contrast to the private interior of the cube, projections of extremely enlarged microorganisms wander along the unprinted exterior surfaces as well as throughout the space. Nele Ströbel has been working for years with the incredible formal diversity, the differentiated structure and the aesthetic appeal of so-called radiolarians and diatoms (microorganisms) from the sea, which she also translates into ceramic objects.

This installation is one of a variety of artistic positions that, within the framework of an exhibition concept, enables young artists to deal with the thematic and formal issues of work and communication spaces.

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