Ina Weber – The world without qualities

New-Old Buildings. Certain places have a particular sound, are full of music, which is subjective, in contrast to the objective character of other places associated with emotions and life designs and could hardly be more impersonal. This describes the architecture of the 1950s and 1960s in many cities, above all the so-called social housing or the shopping mile, where little room is left for feeling or individual happiness: façade-desolation! Public furnishing for the middle class: goal-oriented, serial, unshapely, boring, replaceable. Our poor parents who grew up after the war with such absurd dreams of new modernity and quality of life! Where was there room for melancholy, private sediments, stones softened like old bread in warm milk, accompanied by the relishing of cigarette smoke? One generation stood between dream and fulfillment: ours, born in the 1960s, held the lease to an age of sweet nostalgia, lived life as it came and read the cities as textbooks of broken dreams. The band Einstürzende Neubauten set the rhythm. Those were beautiful years: exciting, excessive, chaotic, pure ... and ultimately past. Yet the feeling remains. “Is the contemporary city like the contemporary airport – ‘all the same’?” asked Rem Koolhaas in 1995, seventeen years after Brian Eno composed the music to go along with this statement and founded the Ambient label.[1] Thirteen years later, in 2008, Ina Weber used the title L-M-S-XS for her exhibition at the Wenzel Hablik Museum in Itzehoe, borrowing from the book by Rem Koolhaas S, M, L, XL.

Concrete brut. As mirrors of this feeling and of the zeitgeist that has lasted up to the present day, the designs of living spaces in Ina Weber’s sculptures and watercolors seem to fit with the mobile, unattached city dweller of contemporary life. Her sculptures mostly consist of the materials that certain dreams are surely not made of. At the same time, they define sites, places and situations, which create an atmosphere that is enjoyable from an artistic distance. Concrete was and is the magic formula of cities, the agglomeration of urban life and social differences. The quickly solidifying mass of cement, water and sand has tempted more than one engineer into breakneck constructions. When steel is added it rapidly becomes a utopia, if one knows how to form it. Thanks to Bauhaus!

Miniature golf. On account of its music scene, among other things, Ina Weber lived for a long time in Brighton, a place whose charm recalls an old coat or an abandoned gas station. A city on the sea, directly on the beach, with pebbles and salt water –empty and yet still metropolitan. Comparable to a bus stop: a site between two sites with the typical accoutrement of simple roof, bench, bus stop sign, trashcan. The emptiness at such places is beautiful, a model of harmonious references to the people who come here on a daily basis just to get to another place. So it is with miniature golf, which may be equally as dumb as looking at the pier in Brighton or the trashcan at a bus stop, but more fun. The family- and popular-sport character of miniature golf has long been an irritant, yet an amusement at the same time – it is mostly children who persuade their parents to go to the golf courses, populated by pensioners with serious ambitions – an amusement due above all to the smallness, the almost narrow-minded character of the facilities, and the obligatory kiosk. [...]

[1] Rem Koolhaas, “The Generic City,” in: Koolhaas et al., Small, Medium, Large, Extra-Large, New York: The Monachelli Press, 1995, p. 1248; Brian Eno, Ambient 1: Music for Airports, Polydor 1978, the LP was produced in London and Cologne.


Catalog excerpt "Extended. Sammlung Landesbank Baden-Württemberg"
Editors: Lutz Casper, Gregor Jansen, published by Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg, 2009

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Works in the Exhibition