Urban Notations [Barbican]

Ruth Hommelsheim: Urban Notations [Barbican]

Casper Mueller Kneer are pleased to present a site specific installation by Berlin based artist Ruth Hommelsheim. This is connected to an ongoing series of events initiated by the architects Casper Mueller Kneer and involving artists whos work is related to architecture.

Urban Notations [Barbican], is part of a long-term research on urbanity. It presents an analysis of the city based on experience. The artist makes use of the situationist technique of roaming and immersing herself into the flows of the city and their photographic notation. Using the technique of superimposing, Hommelheim emphasizes the multiplicity of contemporary urbanity, a condition that cannot be reduced to a system of signs but is rather understood as an expression of the performative production of everday life.

Urban Notations [Barbican] is a project about and exhibited within the Barbican Estate. The name 'Barbican' comes from the Low Latin word 'Barbecana' which referred to a fortified outpost, gateway or outer defence of a city or castle. The Barbican Estate was built between 1971 and 1982 and designed by the architects Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, a rare examples of Brutalist style in Britain. The artist is wandering through this large scale estate - a city within the city - notating her impressions using the camera.

For her exhibition, Ruth Hommelsheim has produced a spatial installation where the film-like movement through this particular part of the city is brought back into one of its spaces: a photographic ribbon equivalent to a 35mm film emerges and is traced across the walls of the exhibition space in the heart of the Estate.


Ruth Hommelsheim is an artist who works on interdisciplinary and solo projects. While her main medium is photography, Hommelsheim extends the boundaries of the medium, reflecting on its condition and transgressing the documentary approach. Parallel to her ongoing research into urbanity („Un_folded sites', „Urban Atlas', „Urban Notations') she started a new group of works that is charged by a large familiy archive („Perpetuations', „She turns round laughing',„Assemblies').
Ruth Hommelsheim (*1965) studied photography in Darmstadt/Germany and now lives and works in Berlin. In 2007 she co-founded Loris Gallery, a collective and discursive platform for visual, but also societal, political and social implementations of artistic questions. Hommelsheim's work has been exhibited throughout Germany, Europe and recently China. www.hommelsheim.com