Katharina Sieverding. Sieverding Palermo

Urban development, public spaces, migration and integration are the key themes of this year's Manifesta (6 June until 4 November 2018) in Palermo. Themes that Katharina Sieverding has also grappled with for more than forty years. The Düsseldorf - based artist asks questions about the artistic, political and social conditions for how art is produced and received. Political statements in large format have become her trademark. Fourteen works in poster format (252 x 365 cm) from 1969 to 2018 can be seen in Palermo for the first time. In the ‘Haus der Kunst’, a converted factory building in the Cantieri Culturali alla Zisa, the digital prints are applied directly to the plaster-work both inside and outside the building.
Katharina Sieverding's large formats are highly topical. With their urgency they transcend the specificities of a particular conflict and address more long-term questions and problems of social relevance. One of the most prominent works is entitled AM FALSCHEN ORT (IN THE WRONG PLACE). The poster has already been shown publicly in 66 spaces in the city of Düsseldorf, because for Sieverding public spaces become a platform for addressing and discussing political and social conflicts.
 
AM FALSCHEN ORT shows a montage of the refugee camp Zaatari near the Syrian border, inhabited by about 200,000 refugees, and the schematic image of two Russian soldiers loading a fighter jet with an explosive device. Both are originally press photographs. The lettering and title of AM FALSCHEN ORT is borrowed from the title of the autobiography of Edward W. Said, the spiritual father of post-colonialism. 

The overlapping and layering of image and text, which in itself poses a challenge to the viewer, is more relevant than ever in the context of the city of Palermo, its history and present.

The ‘Haus der Kunst’ in Palermo

At the end of 2016, the Düsseldorf - Palermo Association (Verein Düsseldorf – Palermo  e.V.) opened the ‘Haus der Kunst’ on the former industrial site of the CantieriCulturali alla Zisa in Palermo, which hosts art and cultural events from Düsseldorf and North Rhine-Westphalia. The venue creates encounters between two only seemingly different and distant ‘art worlds’: Palermo and Düsseldorf, North Rhine-Westphalia and Sicily. The exhibition site also marks the lively town twinning between Palermo and Düsseldorf. Famous and well-known artists such as Konrad Klapheck, Felix Droese and Valerie Krause, Fulvio Di Piazza and Daniele Franzella, as well as students from the art academies of Düsseldorf and Palermo have so far exhibited here.

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