Benjamin Hirte :
Building a Region / eine Region Bauen

In his installation in Weikendorf, Benjamin Hirte staged space as sculptural cohesion. He often uses minimal elements that he removes from their functional context, reassembling them in a new way. He prefers standardized parts, constructive elements, connecting pieces, or symbols from product emblems, which he then assembles in fragmentary sculptural passages. By combining isolated elements in his own grammar of sculpture, he creates an abstract logic with a dynamics of its own, generating room for the similarities triggered by different levels of language and objects. The installation resembles the ruins of a skeleton structure. The basic elements through which it asserts itself as a space exist, but they do not suggest a solution for establishing order. Transit is possible across the fragile barriers that divide the room into four parts and consist of removable horizontal rods that fit into the vertical poles. Transit works as a kind of glue, bringing big cities and emerging regions together under one umbrella. The four segments of the room are defined as zones that resist potential attempts to cross into them, while also inviting us to undermine this resistance. They are a texture of neighborhoods, underpasses, planes, fields, vectors, density, and distance. The steel scaffolding looks like the ruins of something that was never there, a relic of the mental construction of an umbrella term, a parenthesis. It can be read as a reference to something contemporary that only exists as an idea that has missed the present moment. What remains may be what Benjamin Hirte calls "a symbolic unifying gesture, a claim, an agreement, and (as is often the case) a certain imposition."
(Janina Falkner)