The Berlin artist Pauline Kraneis has been working with urban transitory spaces for many years. These include airports, hotels, escalators or train platforms. Places where physical and figurative spaces of liminality intersect. Usually these have a high, liquid energy. They are interesting, lively places that are constantly in flux.
Corridors and entrance halls are transitory spaces par excellence, defined in architecture as "physical spaces between one destination and the next". In addition to this distributive function, however, such border spaces also offer an informal environment in which conversations and exchanges can take place without organisational conventions. This can be unsettling, but also offers the chance to suspend norms, behaviours and identities because people meet outside clearly defined roles.
This oscillating ambiguity is the starting point of Kraneis' wall piece for the foyer of the Kunstverein. She contrasts its cool architecture with a private landscape that cannot be immediately classified. Fragmentary objects now float in a state of dissolution above an undefined space. The foyer becomes an individual passage space, populated by a carpet fragment, perhaps a curtain, writing utensils or files. All of these are traces or threads that can be picked up and taken away in order to link up again elsewhere or to create a new place - with the carpet as a passage, the curtain, the window as a transition between inside and outside - here and soon. Thus transformed, a foyer can be a place where anything can happen.
