Urban Organisms by Tuce Eerel

Urban Organisms by Tuce Eerel

A weed-based colour laboratory, costumes made of bones, guerilla bill-posting, or subversive alternative street-markings for parking areas: Käthe Wenzel works on the periphery of daily urban life, in urban wastelands and in city systems; she uses weeds, roadkill, and conversation. She explores urban landscapes and “Queer Ecologies” as a transdisciplinary border-crosser with a finely tuned sensory perception for new materials and technologies. She focuses on the adaptability of urban coexistence. Urban Organisms encompasses three groups of works—the Urban Ink Lab, works from Signs and Bones, and Sci-Fi Prototypes. In them, Wenzel hijacks urban spaces: she breaks down wasteland areas in Berlin into micro-localised colour worlds; endangered species live on in constructions made of linen and bones; and chopped-up visual vocabularies of the city are opened up for collective reuse.

Text in English and German. 

Käthe Wenzel is an artist and professor of aesthetic practice at the European University of Flensburg. She was a visiting professor and Fulbright Exchange Scholar at the School of Visual Arts, New York, and a senior fellow at the IFK in Vienna. She has received numerous grants and scholarships, including from the Kulturfonds Foundation, the Böll Foundation, NRW Scholarship for Art, Science and Economics, the Karin Abt Straubinger Foundation, the Artists' Village Schöppingen and others. She works with institutions around the world, including the Gangwon Biennale, Tokyo Mini Print Triennale, PASAJ Istanbul, New York Centre for Book Arts, LENTOS Art Museum, etc. Wenzel has implemented art in architecture projects for the University of Toronto, the Mierendorff School in Berlin and elsewhere. Her works are represented in numerous public collections, including the German Museum of Technology in Berlin, the Weserburg Museum in Bremen, the LWL Museum of Art and Culture - Westphalian State Museum, Muuemsberg Flensburg, Roemer-Pelizaeus-Museum Hildesheim, Museum Oldenburg, Mittelrheinmuseum, the artist's book collection at Telavi State University, Georgia, and others. Her podcast ‘The Artist's Tool Kit’ is available in German and English.