Website Brandenburgischer Kunstsverein Potsdam

Starting in October, BKV Potsdam will present a spatial installation by Sabine Hornig, temporarily transforming the exhibition pavilion on Freundschaftsinsel into a sculpture of light and color. The work explores our relationship with modernist architecture and directly references both the exhibition building itself and its urban surroundings.

Curator: Gerrit Gohlke
Venue: Freundschaftsinsel
Opening: Thursday, October 23, 2025, 7:00 PM

With this, Hornig continues a widely acclaimed series of public space works that examine the self-understanding of open societies — for instance, in a nearly 13-meter-high installation on the glass façade of New York’s LaGuardia Airport in 2020, or more recently in a work at a new building of the German Bundestag that puts the history of democracy and architecture in a state of dynamic tension.

In Potsdam, Hornig will transform the entire glass façade of the late-modernist glass pavilion built in 1973. Her installation turns the building into a luminous sculpture from the outside, directly referencing the layered history of urban development and architecture between the Old Market and Freundschaftsinsel. From the inside, Hornig’s glass work becomes a panoramic view in which questions of democratic participation and modernist utopias play as much a role as the rekindled longings for nostalgic identities.