Bettina Pousttchi (born 1971 in Mainz, Germany) is a German-Iranian artist. She lives and works in Berlin.
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Bettina Pousttchi spent her childhood in Germany and part of the time in Iran. From 1990 to 1992 she studied art at the Université de Paris VIII, and from 1992 to 1997 philosophy, art history, and film theory in Cologne and Bochum. From 1995 to 1999 she studied with Professor Rosemarie Trockel and Professor Gerhard Merz at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. From 1999 to 2000, she attended the renowned Whitney Independent Studio Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, where Isaac Julien, Yvonne Rainer, Mary Kelly, Hal Foster, and Benjamin Buchloh were among her teachers. After a time spent assisting other artists (including Nam June Paik), in 1997 she began exhibiting her own work in Germany and abroad. She participated twice in the Venice Biennale (2003, 2009). Her works are found in numerous private and public collections, including the collection of the Federal Republic of Germany.[1]
Bettina Pousttchi works with photography and video as well as with installation and sculpture. Her major work thus far is the monumental photo installation Echo on Schlossplatz in Berlin (2009), which covered the entire exterior façade of the Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin for a period of six months. Covering nearly two thousand square meters, the photo installation was composed of 970 individual paper posters and formed a continuous motif recalling the Palast der Republik, an iconic building that had recently been demolished on that site. In the summer of 2010, with Basel Time on the façade of Art Basel, she mounts another site-specific work in a public space.
Bettina Pousttchi’s most important photographic works alongside the installation Echo (2009) include the series Starker Staat (Strong state; 2003), Take Off (2005), Parachutes (2007), and The Hetley Suite (2008). The artist often works in series, which she conceives as “cinematographic sequences.” Her photographs always refer more to media reality than to actual reality. Typically, the editing process introduces elements that transform the image, often in the form of horizontal black-and-white lines. Bettina Pousttchi comments on this: “The blurring in my photo works opens up a space of possibility of the imaginary. In this visual uncertainty lies the question of what reality is, if and how it is depicted, and how we perceive it.“[2]
Bettina Pousttchi became known for her videos Auf gute Nachbarschaft (To good neighbors; 1999) and Die Katharina-Show (2000). In the hybrid genre of the docu-clip she developed, she creates portraits in the form of video clips of people living their daily lives and in the process calls into question the claim to reality made by the documentary film. Since 2003, her videos have increasingly become part of three-dimensional works. For example, the video sculpture Landing of 2006 employed ten monitors and twenty-five barriers to create an atmosphere of enigmatic uncertainty in which viewers have to locate themselves between the poles of freedom and security.
One element that occurs frequently in the artist’s sculptures is the crowd barrier, which, in the tradition of object art, she takes from public spaces and transforms. In 2009, Bettina Pousttchi formed two bent crowd barriers entirely from transparent glass for the sculpture Cleared (2009), which was exhibited at the Venice Biennale in the exhibition Glasstress. The barriers address questions of limits, the forces at work therein, and the transformative energy released by breaking them down.
Bettina Pousttchi is a member of the Brutally Early Club, founded by Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Markus Miessen in London in 2006. This salon takes the form of spontaneous meetings in public cafés in London, Berlin, Paris, and New York. At 6:30 a.m., current issues in art, literature, and the sciences are discussed. In addition, she has realized installations in collaboration with the architect Markus Miessen and the artist Rosemarie Trockel[3] and has taken part in a film by Lawrence Weiner (How Far Is There, 1999).