Markus Ambach likes to chat. The curator is sitting on a deck chair in the Kassel garden café “Ahoi” chatting merrily with a group at the next table who are taking a break from the “Documenta fifteen” art show. He tells them that to see his projects, they just have to follow the blue line he drew on the ground. Here on the banks of the Fulda, the Düsseldorf native has set up his headquarters for “One Landscape – Local Knowledge Kassel East”.
Markus Ambach was invited by the Indonesian collective Ruangrupa, which is artistically responsible for this year’s Documenta, and the initiative “Centre for Art/Urban Studies” to design a work. Apart from Markus Ambach, only four other artist groups from Germany have been invited to take part in the world-famous art show: The Center for Art/Urban Studies, students from Gregor Schneider’s class at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, the filmmaker Hito Steyerl and the comic artist Nino Bulling .
It is usually a high honor for artists to take part in the documenta. But this year the organizers have discredited the show. Anti-Semitic attacks, including in the form of the painting “People’s justice” by the group Taring Padi, could be seen in Kassel. Although this work has now been dismantled, it took four weeks for the responsible managing director of the Documenta, Sabine Schormann, to resign from her post. Ambach thinks it’s right that Sabine Schormann has drawn the consequences from the scandal.
However, he does not see any damage to his own reputation through the presentation of his works in an art show that has not clearly differentiated itself from anti-Semitism. He says he is “very happy to be part of this extremely important, highly exciting and challenging exhibition”.
Markus Ambach is not an artist in the traditional sense, because for his projects, which are commonly described as “art in public space”, he explores places, regions and districts with the aim of tracking down initiatives, associations or groups that promote the “local knowledge” to shine. What initially sounds cryptic is very practice-oriented in its implementation.
For the Documenta, for example, Ambach found nine groups, companies and associations along a route more than two kilometers long in the east of Kassel – the one marked in blue – that provide information on how this still rural district is socially, economically and culturally structured is.
Embedded in the tour are, for example, a self-harvesting garden, the “Fuldaue Solidarity Farming”, the Blüchergarten community garden and the scrap yard for Jaguar cars. Now Ambach does not collect any statistical data, he does not plan his projects for completeness. They tend to be more personally motivated samples.
If you accompany the curator on his tour of Kassel, you can feel at every turn how curious and empathetic he is towards people. In the Balcke family’s garden, he talks to his son Philip, who is showing off the wind turbines he built himself. Philip is proud to be able to use their energy to run a chainsaw. At the Al Wali snack bar next to the vehicle registration office, he asks Mazen Nouruldeen how business is going. You can feel how familiar the two are with each other. Together with the tenant whose restaurant was bombed out in Syria, he created the documenta dish “Zatar” for the 100-day show.
Ambach has been developing his projects in public space in this way for over 20 years, although he does not find this term precise enough. He prefers to call his work “context art”. Before coming to contextual art, he was an artist specializing in photography and light. Born in Darmstadt, he was trained at the University of Applied Sciences in Offenbach. His interest in the “border areas of art” came later, stimulated by his studies in the “Integration of Fine Arts and Architecture” class at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. Since then he has focused his work on the theme of landscape. For the artist, the concept of landscape defines the space and the relationship between culture and nature, that is, a social and cultural construction – not romantic views.
Markus Ambach became known with his presentation “The beauty of the big street”, which took place in 2010 on the occasion of the Ruhr.2010 Capital of Culture. To this end, he spent five years dealing with the urban space of the federal highway 1/A40 between the Duisburg-Kaiserberg motorway junction and the Dortmund Stadtkrone district. As he always does when preparing for a project, he walked around a lot and talked to people who made him curious. For example, with a group of tuners who regularly meet with their converted cars on Fridays between 6 p.m. and 8 p.m. at Dükerweg in Bochum. He included the meetings in his exhibition because this scene is living culture.
If you listen to Ambach, you might think that he is something like the Alexander von Humboldt of the street, who, instead of exploring the vegetation in the Amazon, goes stalking in the jungle of the big city. But Ambach is not a researcher or sociologist, but an artist. And as such, he is also interested in seeing how other artists deal with his discoveries.
In addition to “making local knowledge visible”, the 58-year-old’s exhibitions have a second pillar – the creation of works of art. For the Düsseldorf project “From foreign countries in their own cities”, which took place four years ago around the socially deprived main station, he was able to win renowned colleagues such as Katharina Sieverding, Paloma Varga Weisz, Andreas Siekmann and Manuel Graf.
In the current show “Folkwang and the City”, which is currently taking place in Essen City-Nord, Fari Shams has recreated the world-famous sculpture “The Thinker” by Auguste Rodin – and placed it almost poetically on a water surface. And in the empty club “naked”, Anouk Kruithof shows 8000 international dances in a video installation. The Essen show, which Ambach developed together with the Museum Folkwang on the occasion of its 100th anniversary, burdens art with addressing “central social questions about integration, cultural diversity, sustainability, globalization, digitality, urban life and urban development”. . So the announcement of the museum.
And as if that wasn’t enough, you also want to approach people and meet them in their “immediate living environment”. If you visit the Nordcity exhibition on a Sunday afternoon, however, you will be very disillusioned. There are hardly any visitors at the individual locations – not to mention encounters. What else is art supposed to achieve? And aren’t many projects rather social work? “Exciting question,” says Ambach. He no longer has to remind himself that Joseph Beuys also broke the boundaries of the classical concept of art with his projects.
For Ambach there is an exchange between sociological positions and artistic ones. “On the fringes of art” is a term he likes to repeat. Sometimes it overturns in exuberance, for example when you think the tuners on the A40 are artists. Of course they are not. And he also knows that you can’t feed the world’s population with the work of agricultural collectives or fix political crises with repair workshops for electrical appliances.
“I don’t want to replace art, I want to expand it,” says Markus Ambach. For him, the impetus that comes from the initiatives is crucial. “These are positive approaches that not only criticize, but also make suggestions for action.”