DIALOG & TEXT

15 YEARS
Das KloHäuschen

by
Dr. Cornelia Oßwald-Hoffmann

For 15 years, “Das KloHäuschen” has been claiming a multifunctional platform for art of all disciplines. This platform explores and communicates its own terrain, presentation by presentation, performance by performance, etc. “Das KloHäuschen” is always included in a spatial and content-related context as a kind of partner in a play with which the selected artists, dancers, musicians, authors, etc. engage in order to realize their own works and communicate them to the outside world.

„Das KloHäuschen“ has a double role to play here: it is not only a space for art that has not or not yet become established or consciously resists establishment. But it also offers a remembered, content-related connotation with its own history that becomes the interface for all works developed with this space.

This small, rather inconspicuous place with its rude charm has developed an almost unique character of its own through its architectural historicity and its former physical use. Created at the beginning of the 20th century as a public toilet, its exterior was dressed up and adorned with a historicist façade that concealed its socially tabooed use. Deprived of this function in the 1990s, it became superfluous and stood empty until Anja Uhlig discovered it as an anarchic place for art. Anarchic above all because, as a functional space, it no longer serves any purpose or rules and is therefore totally lost and simultaniously totally open and free on the other.

To this day, “Das KloHäuschen” offers a small, safe, enclosed space for the development of one’s own world of thought. It is a kind of inverted garden of paradise, a private place for its guests to concentrate on their own ideas and concepts, translate them into a valid form and share them with the audience in intimate proximity.

Art Historian and Curator Dr. Cornelia Oßwald-Hoffmann knows Das KloHäuschen hearly since its beginning and she was the curator of the 1st KloHäuschen Biennial, 2012 – “Biennale for One”.