Wir vom Mittleren Ring, 2024

The idea of creating collective art is generally closely linked to a common search by allied artists for alternative, generally socialist concepts of society. The photographer Olaf Wiehler and the urban artist Sascha Hausmann are united by their affection for the Munich district of Giesing and the desire to use their artistic work to contribute to the conscious handling of human habitats and what we call “resources”. They met through their art and both felt that their work touched each other.

There is no common manifesto or political goal that they share. Nevertheless, both see their art as an impetus to turn towards each other, to show themselves and see each other, as a counterforce to emotional isolation, especially in urban environments.

Respect for the autonomy of the artistic expression of the other is at the forefront, combined with the desire to enrich this expression with their own artistic statements. It is their open-ended curiosity about the process and their enjoyment of the process that allows them to organically grow beyond the self with this series.

The artistic acceptance of the simultaneity of different perspectives contributes to the emotional depth and tension of the works. Contradictions lose the quick impulse of resistance and open up. For each other.

With the photographic works in the MITTLERER RING series taken in his immediate neighborhood, Olaf Wiehler wants to give a face to the people who strive to shape their living spaces, which often have no alternative. By attaching meaning to our perceptions and what surrounds us, we can germinate the grain of hope that we all need to live on. Power and life seem to grow out of shadows.

With his sculptural treatment of the photographs, Sascha Hausmann quietly and all the more insistently places his finger in the wounds that Olaf Wiehler wants to make more bearable through his aestheticizing visual language. Fabric, putty, acrylic paints, folding rules and construction foam surround people in their metropolitan living spaces. Measured, wired and standardized. Tubular gauze wraps itself around aching wounds like a soothing bandage. Wounds that bind us humans together and can thus release us from our isolation.