knorle & baetig contemporary

Wintherthur Urban Art Festival, Switzerland

22 August  to  27 September, 2014

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This exhibition borrows its title from Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (first published 1818; revised edition 1831). In it, Victor Frankenstein, an ambitious scientist from Geneva, assembles life from what is at hand and unleashes a being he cannot control. The tale has become a modern myth. It warns that the urge to create without care can turn invention into ruin. We take this story not as a gothic ornament but as a lens through which to read the city we have made.

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Our world suggests that horror rarely arrives as a single monstrous figure. It appears in structures that grow beyond our sight. The city is one such figure. We have nurtured it. It has evolved, faltered, revived, and now moves with a strange life of its own. The city resembles Shelley’s creature in one crucial respect. It is assembled from disparate parts, it feels deeply while often showing little, and it exceeds the intentions of its makers.

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Is the city a monster. The question matters less as a verdict than as a method. With global urbanisation reshaping resources, ecologies, movements and memories, the city becomes both theatre and actor. It organises energy, transport and labour. It also produces collisions of culture that can harden into conflict or mature into forms of tolerance and common purpose. As Henri Lefebvre argued in La production de l’espace (1974; English translation The Production of Space, 1991), urban space is a social and political product. It is made by us, and it makes us in return.

 

This exhibition examines how urban form is produced, inhabited and remembered. It attends to borders and thresholds, to welfare and scarcity, to the histories that thread through streets and to the new identities that emerge from proximity. Our concern is not only with failure but with endurance. We ask how the human spirit adapts within accelerating change, and how communities compose workable futures from fragments.

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Ferit Kuyas (born 1955) contributes photographs that register the calm and the claustrophobia of planned environments, from newly minted districts to cities that mirror themselves in unexpected ways. Habib Asal (born 1974) presents an immersive brick installation grounded in research on Winterthur, opening questions about structure, migration and the choreography of mass. Lena Maria Thüring (born 1981) offers a lucid video study of memory in the urban field, where personal histories meet the sociology of place. Together these works build a comparative portrait of local and global city life, and ask what requires attention at a moment when modernity is being rethought.

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The City Is My Frankenstein does not sensationalise decline. It proposes the gallery as a civic room in which to look closely, to listen, and to rehearse better arrangements. If the city sometimes appears as an unguided creature, then guidance is a practice we can learn. The exhibition invites a renewed ethics of making, one that treats planning as care, design as responsibility, and culture as a shared instrument. Perhaps the sharper question is not whether the city is a monster, but whether we can recognise ourselves within it and choose to make a gentler life together.