Petra Spielhagen is a Berlin-based artist who focuses on the interwoven moments between everyday life and the staged. Her output spans three main areas:

Petra Spielhagen is occupied with images of everyday situations in public space, in the landscape and on travels. In particular, she is interested in how sets and scenes for a possible event are emerging in our increasingly staged reality.

She uses photographs and typical resources of the theater to isolate an element from a spatial or temporal context and insert it as a photograph or painted backdrop in another place.

For presentation, she adopts formats and displays of everyday contexts such as advertising. In participatory actions, passers-by are involved. They get a photo of themselves in front of a backdrop or exchange a story for a photo of a place.

Petra lives and works in Berlin, studied free art and stage design at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee. Among other things, she exhibited at the Festival of Regions, Linz, Austria, in the NGBK, Berlin; at the DA, Kunsthaus Kloster Gravenhorst, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in Marseille, France, at the Kunstraum Kreuzberg, Berlin. 

She has received the following prizes and grants, among others: research grant, global grant from the Berlin Senate for Rotterdam, Otte 1 künstlerhaus Eckernförde, Schöppingen Artists’ Village Foundation, Goldrausch female artists’ project, Berlin; Project grant, DA, Kunsthaus Kloster Gravenhorst; Artist Residency, Cannes, France; Hotel Neustadt, Festival, Halle-Neustadt, project funding from the Senate for Science, Research and Culture, Berlin; First prize in the art competition of the Max Planck Society/realization of the Wandering Light Field for the Fritz Haber Institute, Berlin.

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Credits
Website design: Null Zero
Development: Virgile Janssen

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The copyright lies with Petra Spielhagen/VG Bildkunst Bonn and the individual authors and photographers. Despite careful content control, the site owner assumes no liability for the content of external links. The operators of the linked pages are solely responsible for their content.

Grüße aus Hellersdorf

Holiday greetings from Hellersdorf
Berlin, 2014.
Intervention with participation in public space. Scaffolding, plywood, laths, pigments, acrylic paint.
5×2.50m, 5×2.30m, 6×4.50m.
116 C-Prints. Postcard labels
10×15m.

Street sellers and shopkeepers from various origins enliven the public space between Kaulsdorf-Nord Underground station and Cecilienplatz, especially on the two market days. I discussed the theme of home with them and built three picturial backdrops depicting places from their home countries: the One-Pillar Pagoda, the mountain landscape in Göreme-Cappadocia in Turkey and the Jatiyo Sriti Shoudho Monument in Savar in Bangladesh.

For four weeks the installation of the backdrops turned the passageways around the station into special places. For two weeks they served as an open-air photostudio where anyone could have their photo taken by the artist for free and later receive a printout. The 100 or more prints were exhibited at the station urbaner kulturen. At the end of the project the One-Pillar Pagoda was given to the German Vietnamese Association and is installed permanently in its office.

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Installation One-Pillar Pagoda (Chùa Một Cột) in Hanoi in Vietnam - backdrop at U Kaulsdorf-Nord, November 2014.

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Open-air photo studio, Hellersdorf, November 2014.
Photograph: Archiv AG Kunst im Untergrund

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Installation Jatiyo Sriti Shoudho Denkmal Sabhar/Bangladesh – backdrop at Cecilienplatz, November 2014.

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Installation Göreme-Cappadocia in Turkey - backdrop at U Kaulsdorf-Nord, November 2014.

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Installation station urbaner kulturen, December 2014.