2023

auf Anfrage zugänglich

Erweiterungsbau des Asam-Gymnasiums in der Schlierseestraße 20, 81539 München

17 Terrazzo-Fliesen und Messing, jeweils 90 x 90 cm

Architecture: Hirner & Riehl Architekten, München

Photos: Florian Holzherr

Text: Lydia Korndörfer

Nevin Aladag’s site-specific installation Pattern of Fame refers to the similarly named Walk of Fame in Hollywood, even though it is not designed to be a tourist attraction. Strictly speaking, Aladag’s “stars” can only be seen by the pupils and teachers at the Asam Gymnasium in Obergiesing. Alluding to the American original, the artist gives it an entirely new complexity, through its interplay with form and typeface.

On Hollywood Boulevard, the two connotations of the English word “star” convey an easily understood message: This is where the most brilliant entertainment figures anywhere on the planet are honored. The name of each star is framed by a sparkling celestial body, a star. Nevin Aladag adopts this scaled-down aesthetic. Seventeen of the 90 x 90 terrazzo tiles designed by the artist were laid on the floor in two areas of the Asam Gymnasium: the skyway connecting the original building from the 1960s with the new, five-story annex designed by Hirner & Riehl Architekten, and in an atrium inside the new school building. As they are in Hollywood, the square plates with a black background and the central, coral-pink pictorial ornament are made of terrazzo. In Aladag’s work, though, the outer edges of each tile as well as the contours of its ornamental elements are framed in brass. Moreover, the inscriptions are not part of the pattern itself but are legible in the lower right edge.

The complex figures found on the terrazzo plates seem to draw upon the entire circle of geometrical forms. The artist gathered them from around the world and supplemented them with items collected in the Munich area by the students of the Asam Gymnasium. The gazes of both the artist and the students alit on barred windows, ornamental façades, manhole covers, or other urban details. Combined with the inscriptions, the selected ornaments in Pattern of Fame are stylized, turned into symbolic representations of certain places in Munich or around the world. In contrast to the Hollywood experience, the attributions here are often in conflict with expectations. Upon closer inspection of the panels, the local and the global dovetail. Instead of differences, similarities are primarily visible. With all of them framed inside the square format, Perlach, Hong Kong, and Calcutta are conceptually close to each other. Ornaments framed in circles bring Cairo and Tel Aviv within reach of each other. Ultimately, these two forms appear to be directly related with those found in the Munich Residenz, the Frauenkirche, and in Giesing.

The question of the pattern’s origins, therefore, cannot be answered all that easily. And this is precisely where Aladag’s artistic concept—already expressed in other works that concentrate on the meaning of ornamentation, such as Social Fabric (2017 onward) or the documenta 14 sculpture Jali (2017)—is positioned. In Aladag’s art, exploring ornaments and patterns seems to be equivalent to the study of music. The artist treats both subjects as languages understood around the world, or else as semiotic systems that develop regardless of national borders. On a more abstract level, she also touches upon one of the most burning cultural, social, and political problems: the issue of ancestry, identity, and belonging. It is a theme that continues to confront the artist, who grew up in Stuttgart, now lives in Berlin, and whose family immigrated from Turkey. In front of this backdrop, the precision of Pattern of Fame (which, in passing, turns stereotypical worldviews upside-down) is hardly surprising. Without any sort of didactic overtones, schoolchildren and teachers are reminded every day of how people from diverse backgrounds have not only brought these forms to different places around the world, but also to our fellow human beings equally.

Ultimately, this is also articulated on a formal level. The look of Aladag’s formal vocabulary here is reminiscent of diagrams of physical particles and chemical compounds, apparently having found a suitable environment here in the science- and technology-oriented Asam Gymnasium. This makes it clear that ornamental fragments, i.e., individual elements, removed from their context can never represent the whole. These are not images of the Frauenkirche, or Paris, or Tokyo, but simply a smidgen of these buildings and places. The overall image, or the whole, would only be visible as the sum of all its parts. This kind of compound of various elements not only finds its corellary in physics and chemistry, but also in societal reality. Society as a body, the cultural field, and finally, humankind itself can be understood as a bundle of individual, distinct parts that react to each other, then form relationships, and later a whole, despite their differences—or perhaps because of them.