Bettina Pousttchi

Since 2009, Bettina Pousttchi has been realizing photographic interventions on public buildings, which are related to the urban and historic context of each particular place. Her monumental photo installation Echo on Schlossplatz in Berlin covered the entire exterior façade of the Temporäre Kunsthalle for half a year. Extending nearly 2,000 square meters, the installation consisted of 970 different paper posters, and formed a continuous motif that recalled the Palast der Republik (Palace of the Republic), the building which had just been demolished on that very site. On the façade of Art Basel 2010, she mounted Basel Time, a large photo installation that alluded to the imminent demolition of the hall as part of a redesign of Basel's Messeplatz. At the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, the artist presented the site-specific photo installation Framework (2012) in its rotunda and on its eastern façade. This work's point of departure was the building's historical and urban context. In London, she conceived the photo installation Piccadilly Windows (2013) for the Hauser & Wirth Gallery building on Piccadilly, covering their windows with a photographic pattern. In 2014, the artist transformed the Nasher Sculpture Center Dallas into a Drive-Thru Museum, referencing the site's history and the architecture of the Renzo Piano building. Her up to now largest photo installation to this point is The City (2014), which covered three sides of the Wolfsburg castle with a 2,150 square meter photographic print. The photomontage shows ten skyscrapers that have been the world's highest buildings, grouping them together into an imaginary single transnational skyline.

At the Arts Club of Chicago she realized in 2017 the photo installation Suspended Mies, referring to the Arts Club´s Mies van der Rohe staircase, a commission from the architect for a previous building.

Over the summer of 2018 a freestanding pavilion by Bettina Pousttchi was commissioned by Neues Museum Nürnberg. Located on Klarissenplatz in front of the museum, the photo pavilion UNN (United Nations Nuremberg) recalled the history of Nuremberg and its relevance for the development of international human rights.

The project World Time Clock is the artist's most comprehensive photographic series to date for which she travelled eight years in several stages in the world's various time zones. In each of the places she photographed public clocks always at the same time; 1,55 pm. Thus arose a work spanning the entire globe which examines the political and social organization of time and space in such cities as New York, London, Hongkong, Sydney, Tashkent, Cape Town, Dubai, Moscow, Mexico City, Yangon, Rio de Janeiro etc. The 24-part photo series premiered 2016 at the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC in a 360-degree presentation. The curator of the presentation, Melissa Ho, comments "World Time Clock visualizes a new world order, one that lacks a center but runs in a circuit through 24 equal hubs." The director of the Hirshhorn Museum, Melissa Chiu calls the series "A poetic contemplation on global synchronicity and the structuring of time."[1] This experience of nonlinear temporal structure is to be found in many of the artist's works.

Everyday objects of urban space like crowd barriers, street bollards and bicycle racks occur frequently in the artist's sculptures and, in the tradition of object art, she transforms them. The sculpture series Double Monuments for Flavin and Tatlin consist of deformed crowd barriers and neon tubes, which function as a double hommage to Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International as well as Dan Flavin’s "monuments" for V.Tatlin. It debuted in her extensive solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Basel 2011. The Phillips Collection in Washington DC presented 2016 five of these sculptures in dialogue with their collection. At the 2009 Venice Biennale, Pousttchi's sculpture Cleared, consisting of two crowd barriers made of security glass, was part of the Glasstress exhibition.

The use of these objects address questions of limits, the forces at work therein, and the transformative energy released by passing them, underlining the artist´s transnational approach to her work.

The artist's video works initially consisted of single channel works and subsequently evolved into spatially encompassing video installations. In these installations it is often the projected space which continues on into the exhibition hall and the various levels of reality blend into one another.