tanja kullack

read. negotiate. transform.

'Spatial Practice' describes an approach to architecture that engages analytically, carefully, responsibly and empathetically with what is already there. It evolves through an engagement with specific situations and the relationships between spatial, social and cultural conditions and the interests of different actors. Starting from visions, needs and controversies, it seeks appropriate responses that translate requirements, concerns and necessities into robust concepts, programmes and narratives – and ultimately into architecture, space and atmosphere.

zweikant architekturen is a platform for the collaborative, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary development of spatial strategies, concepts and projects. Working with changing, project-specific teams, it develops projects in architecture, interior architecture, exhibition design and spatial interpretation through structured, discursive processes.

Existing spatial, social and cultural conditions, structures and relationships form the basis of this work. Their qualities become material for continuation, rewriting and reinterpretation. Existing “talents”, strengths and potentials are identified, read and valued; through transformation, what is already there can acquire new meaning or become legible in new ways.

The projects Lindower 18 and Elli exemplify this approach in commercial and residential contexts; the exhibitions Violence and Gender and the permanent exhibition at Schloss Burg demonstrate it in the context of exhibition-making and spatial interpretation. These projects were developed in collaboration with Holzer Kobler Architekturen.

WINNER! Bildungs- und Erinnerungsort am Checkpoint Charlie, with A24/Landscape and Holzer Kobler Architekturen.

violence and gender

Male War – Female Peace?

The exhibition Violence and Gender examines the visible and less visible roles of women and men in war and peace. Just as war and peace are not absolute conditions, gender roles are far less clear-cut than the familiar opposition of the peaceful woman and the violent man might suggest.

The prologue introduces this ambiguity through a simple shift of perspective. Freestanding easels display reproductions of historical battle scenes and portraits of rulers – conventional representations of power and violence. Yet the subject of the prologue is not what these images depict, but who created them: every work was painted by a woman. Only by moving around the images do visitors discover portraits and biographies of the artists on their reverse sides. A change of position reveals a different narrative.

The main exhibition extends this principle spatially. Its themes unfold across the museum’s historic galleries and an industrial hall in an adjacent building. In the first section, 'Power and the Military', large-scale translucent, movable partitions choreograph both movement through the space and views of the exhibits. Constellations of objects and themes emerge, shift and dissolve; relationships are created through movement and depend on the position of each visitor.

In the former industrial hall, the movable partitions continuously form and dissolve temporary spaces. Here, objects and themes are more explicitly structured, providing a theoretical framework for what has previously been encountered. The exhibition does not aim to resolve contradictions, but to create spaces in which different readings, associations and positions can coexist and be critically examined.

The content is further developed through thematic display tables and vitrines alongside individually positioned key exhibits. A deliberately direct and restrained exhibition architecture gives precedence to the objects and the narratives they carry. Illuminated signs provide orientation while allowing visitors to follow different thematic paths through the exhibition.

Outside, the exhibition intersects with 'Targeted Interventions'. In sculptures evoking both missiles and human bodies, artists from six countries explore analogies between bodies of violence and gendered bodies. This exhibition within the exhibition was funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation and curated by Sarah Sigmund and Robert Lewetzky.

cooperation with: Holzer Kobler Architekturen.
credits © Jan bitter