artspace

In September 2024, the CROSSING art spaces in the south of Essen were opened in the presence of Lord Mayor Thomas Kufen. A space for art, action and dialogue – with an in experimental character and a central theme: CROSSING is dedicated to crossing borders and experiences of transition. How are real and imaginary borders experienced and what experiences are associated with it? And what happens in the in-between?

In its claim to be an open space for experience and thought, CROSSING takes an interdisciplinary approach to a variety of different questions on the subject and offers both artistic and discursive formats a space for exhibitions, performances, workshops and discussions. The initiative emerged from the identically named research project CROSSING THE THRESHOLD by artist Katharina Lökenhoff and establishes a place in Essen to explore strategies for sustainable thinking and action creatively, aesthetically and philosophically.

They can contribute to seclusion, isolation and alienation, but they can also provide protection, support and orientation. And last but not least, they can be transgressed, shifted or overcome: borders. They raise ethical questions, determine identity discourses and are often the subject of subversive questioning in artistic forms of representation. Taking up the complex metaphor of the border and border thinking, the group exhibition also explores separating and differentiating, relationship-establishing and connecting functions in intersubjective contexts. The aesthetic exploration by Sebastian Fritzsch, Katharina Lökenhoff and Sabine Osthoff centres on border phenomena that explore time and again areas of an in-between that remains unmarked and open. Those places of transgression elude explicitness and create a dynamic that stimulates the constant re-negotiation of real and imaginary border formations. Along constants and fault lines, the exhibition creates different perspectives on borders and transitions as encounters with the Other. A balancing act that sometimes leads to existential tipping points where there is a risk of slipping. A fine line that can lead to getting lost in the world or falling into oneself. In free fall, this also means: tilting into the inside. A state that points into the open, into a groundlessness and boundlessness, without safe railings or landmarks. A collapse into consciousness that transcends words. Like an inward gaze, which can be delimiting towards the inside and can mean confinement towards the outside. NUKLEUS deals with physical and mental borderline experiences, which can be characterised by uncertainties and insecurities, curiosity and a thirst for adventure, but also by an existential fear – of the abyss, the fall into the bottomless pit, the immensity of space and time. 

The exhibition itself also operates across the board: with paintings, collages, installations and sculptural ceramics as well as the performance ‘AKTION: Haar!’, it brings together artistic works and positions by Sebastian Fritzsch, Katharina Lökenhoff and Sabine Osthoff – and with them visual and aesthetic cultures and practices from the visual arts, film, theatre and drama. 

Julia Martel