ONE WALL BY VARIOUS & GOULD
- Urban Nation
- July 28, 2023
With the involvement of young people from the neighborhood Heerstraße Nord, the Berlin artist duo Various & Gould has realized the ONE WALL “We all here belong to the Us” at Obstallee 45 in Staaken. The work is based on the principle of collage, one of the duo’s essential techniques.
Previously, Various & Gould led a workshop for children and teenagers at the STEIG youth center, where participants collaged faces out of colored paper using Various & Gould’s technique. The young people were then photographed and now serve as the basis for the larger-than-life wall piece. Disassembled into individual parts and then reassembled, they form the communal face of the neighborhood and, as ONE WALL, are an expression of a colorful community. The children’s names served as a grid on the wall and thus also became part of the image.
The new ONE WALL continues the Dadaist collage series “Face Time” that Various & Gould first started in 2014. Whether executed as a silkscreen or a mural, the faces of fictional patchwork characters celebrate diversity and disrupt habitual ideals of beauty. At the same time, they pose the question of the mutability of identity and its meaning in a social context.
Works by Various & Gould are also part of the exhibition “TALKING… & OTHER BANANA SKINS,” on view at the URBAN NATION Museum through December 2024.
