24 Flags - a project of the Kunstmeile Hamburg
June - October 2025
Opening on 24 June, 6 pm, at Kunsthaus Hamburg
On the 24 flagpoles along the Kunstmeile, artists Than Hussein Clark, Özgür Kar and Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili will show works developed especially for this space. With ‘24 Flags’, the Kunstmeile Hamburg is sending a visible signal for cultural presence and artistic participation in public spaces. The project is part of the pilot projects of the Hamburg programme ‘Verborgene Potenziale – Gemeinschaftliche Entwicklung der Nutzungsvielfalt für eine lebendige und resiliente Hamburger Innenstadt’, funded by the programme and Housing and the federal programme ‘Verborgene Potenziale – Gemeinschaftliche Entwicklung der Nutzungsvielfalt für eine lebendige und resiliente Hamburger Innenstadt’, which is funded by the Ministry of Urban Development and Housing as well as the federal programme ‘Zukunftsfähige Innenstädte und Zentren’. ‘24 Flags’ is designed as a temporary platform for contemporary art in public space; together with the existing structure of the Kunstmeile, it opens up a dialogue between the public, the city, the institutions, and the works. Visible and accessible to all passers-by, the project invites people to view familiar places in a new light and to reflect on their everyday movements. The French sociologist Michel de Certeau described walking as a ‘space of enunciation’ – an activity that renders the city tangible, creates places, and establishes relationships between them. With this in mind, ‘24 Flags’ is conceived as a practice that activates the process of visualisation and localisation within urban structures. Jury: Anna Nowak (Geschäftsführung und künstlerische Leitung, Kunsthaus Hamburg), Milan Ther (Direktor, Kunstverein in Hamburg) & Paul Grziwok (Projektleitung Kunstmeile Hamburg) Texts: Katrin Krumm Timetable: 24.6. – 20.7. Than Hussein Clark
21.7. – 4.8. Pride flags
5.8. – 10.8. Than Hussein Clark
11.8. – 14.9. Özgür Kar
15.9. – 20.10. Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili
Than Hussein Clark
24.6 - 20.7 & 5.8 - 10.8
Author, director, sculptor – Than Hussein Clark’s artistic work is characterised by his constantly changing roles. His practice focuses on objects, which appear in a variety of forms: theatre productions, items of furniture, scripts, sculptures, and installations. Drawing on his interest in skilled craft and aesthetic potential, he explores fi elds that lie outside the canon of ‘high art’, such as fashion, interior, and lighting design. Within these disciplines, he examines the ideologies inscribed in them and juxtaposes them with critical counter- concepts such as camp, which subverts cultural norms through its aesthetic of exaggeration and staged artifi ciality. By combining narrative, spatial, material, and theoretical approaches, he creates an art form that eludes established categorisations and forms of utilisation. In his work, the act of not being fully legible becomes a strategy that generates desire through denial.
Özgür Kar
11.8. - 14.9.
The Walking Death presents a skeleton in a three-step walk cycle across a series of flags. A recurring figure in Kar’s work, the skeleton draws from the Danse Macabre, the late medieval allegory that served as a reminder of mortality. Suspended above the street, the wind and the repetition of the flags animate the skeleton, which echoes the movement of passing pedestrians, walking alongside the city’s everyday life.