Artists

Helene Kuschnarew

Press release

What happens when a place loses its familiar order? What images arise between the masses and the individual? Helene Kuschnarew's pictorial spaces remain deliberately open: they pick up on shifts without defining them. Social and institutional structures are hinted at, moral and cultural norms are touched upon, taboo subjects are only skirted. How big is 360 hectares? As big as 504 football pitches, seven times the size of the Vatican or around 5,000 tennis courts – or Wacken. The title 360 Hectares refers to the village of Wacken, which temporarily becomes a big city thanks to the annual Wacken Open Air heavy metal festival. Between a few thousand residents and tens of thousands of visitors, a state of emergency arises that raises questions about community, ritual and collective identity. The place functions both as a real reference and as a carrier of collective and individual memory. Transience and short-livedness appear as structural principles, for example when pigment dust is applied directly to the wall and then removed again. Kuschnarew's practice moves in a field of tension between archiving, traces and superimposition, in which images form as provisional states. Invited by Fiona Pauline Borowski Helene Kuschnarew graduated in 2025 as a master student at the Düsseldorf Art Academy with Prof. Peter Piller.