Alternativa International Contemporary Visual Art Festival / Wyspa Institute of Art Gdansk /

Estrangement is curated by Aneta Szylak and Hiwa K.

Work Hüseyin Karakaya Para Stigma "Pohle"   9/2011

Materials: refrigerator (working) / books from Mönchengladbach & archive footage of the Gdańsk Shipyard / lashings(4000kg pull) / broken beer bottles, beer smell (labels "strong", "harder" 7% alcohol, mostly drunken by the poor & workers in Poland )

The title of this installation relates to an inscription made by hand on the metal door of a boiler room in a house at 13 Rathaus Street 13 in Monchengladbach. With a yellow crayon somebody wrote Pohle with an 'h'. In a 'better' district I found two boxes full of books. In Mönchengladbach they throw out waste paper once a month. Based on the books contained in these boxes I imagined a Pole who came to Germany to study medicine and now gives his ainly Polish - books away to waste paper. It was an accidental find and yet, for me, it constituted an important step towards an analysis of the city atmosphere and exhibition rooms. The rooms I came-upon inthe exhibition space were squalid and littered. And I was convinced that I would find traces of this atmosphere in many places of tbe city. I found a fridge in front of the Abteiberg Museum (a high one, with'a freezer), also put out on the street, to be scrapped. Iwas dejected by the fact that there was still some foodstuff in the fridge. Slowly, thanks to these materials found on . .the street and a specific·status of

the rooms, the installation developed into an exhibition site.

Hüseyin Karakaya

Alternativa 1 / Estrangement