Das Sprechende Eck

Situated on a ball field near Dreiringplatz is a bright yellow, situationally deployable and mobile architecture called Das Sprechende Eck (The Talking Corner) by the artist and art educator Maximiliane Baumgartner (b. 1986). As an open playing field and framework for action, it invites children, youth, and adults to explore their very own artistic forms of agency. Following the motto ‘We accept commissions’, an office run by participating children and adolescents for the duration of the exhibition takes on and carries out commissions from local businesses and public venues, such as hair salons, Internet cafés, bakeries, or cinemas. Possible commissions include advertising, decorating store windows, and photography.

In her artistic work, Maximiliane Baumgartner examines the emancipatory potential of critical and feminist education, as well as performative forms of learning. Her interest is focused on the question of how to create a public sphere within an urban environment, and on the interplay between artistic mediation and one’s own art-related productive activity. The artist’s conceptual series of paintings, which, for her, reflect an expanded field of action, are likewise distinguished by an exploratory practice. Das Sprechende Eck is inspired by play sculptures in the context of radical pedagogy and action pedagogy of the 1970s and by the architecture of Soviet bus stops in which painting was an integral part.