Mischa Kuball

(UN)FINISHED
St. Matthäus, Berlin

Homage to the Unfinished

Mischa Kuball (b. Dusseldorf, 1959; lives and works in Dusseldorf) works with slide projections and light, often in institutional and urban settings. For the intervention (UN)FINISHED inside Saint Matthew’s Church at the Kulturforum in Berlin, he devoted his attention to the surrounding architectural ensemble. Kuball’s project is a creative and compressed rendering of history: from the early days of the chic Tiergartenviertel neighborhood to its destruction fueled by Albert Speer’s fantasies of omnipotence and then in World War II and on to Mies van der Rohe’s and Hans Scharoun’s temples to modernism.

Commentators discussing Herzog & de Meuron’s Museum of the 20th Century, under construction right next to the church, have spoken of the Kulturforum’s architectonic “completion.” By contrast, the publication accompanying the project, with essays by Joachim Brand, Bonaventure Ndikung, and Hannes Langbein and a conversation with the artist, champions its “unfinished” state as preserving the vitality of art as well as religion. In one of Berlin’s most prominent cultural centers, the artist calls on us to embrace the openness of history and public space alike.