Over five weeks in summer 2024, POTLUCK brings together artists, performers and collectives from Ireland, Northern Ireland and Germany at Kunst-Station Sankt Peter in Cologne, a church and internationally renowned exhibition space for contemporary art.
POTLUCK is a growing, site-specific installation in the centre of the vast church building, with each invited artist or collective adding to the temporary structure and activating it with performances or other forms of intervention, including (but not limited to) sculptural and installation works, workshops, lectures, concerts, or collective naps. Cologne-based artist collective Jellyspoor will act as co-host and provide the modular structure in the central nave of the church that works as stage, refuge, starting-point or playground for the five invited artists and collectives from Ireland.
Each artistic position, which engages with aspects of collaborative processes, artistic self-reflection, queer topics and collective care, can develop over the course of one week, adding as much or little to the main installation as desired. POTLUCK experiments with different forms of collaboration in a shared space while still giving each invited artist time and space for their contributions to carve their own presence in the unique architecture and atmosphere of Sankt Peter.
Participating artists: Mark Buckeridge, Emma Brennan, Áine O’Hara, Jellyspoor (Evamaria Schaller and Andreas Gehlen). Curated by Anne Mager.
More informationFor 30 years, the Kunst-Station Sankt Peter Köln has been known far beyond Germany as a place where spirituality and liturgy meet contemporary art and music. Launched in 1987 by Fr. Friedhelm Mennekes SJ, this initiative has since organized more than 150 exhibitions of sculptures, paintings and installations as countless concerts by artists from all over the world.
Artists such as Antoni Tàpies, Cindy Sherman, Francis Bacon, Rosemarie Trockel, Jenny Holzer, Eduardo Chillida, Anish Kapoor, Christian Boltanski, Jannis Kounellis, Barbara Kruger, Kris Martin, Olafur Eliasson, Kara Walker, Walid Raad and many others presented their works in the modernized space of the early 16th century parish church.
However, in the now largely empty church space, where services are still celebrated, the art is by no means intended to illustrate the formulated faith. Rather, the artists confront the congregation and visitors with existential questions of life. In this way, the Kunst-Station Sankt Peter Köln is a dialogue space of its own kind, in which the otherwise separate realms of art and spirituality can enter into a dialogue without appropriating one another.