Summer of the Arts

Danica Dakić (b. 1962 in Sarajevo, lives in Düsseldorf) works mainly with the media of video, photography, and installation. Her video pieces deal with collective memory and the stories of historically charged places, where she develops cinematic narratives together with the local protagonists. Here, the people, settings, architecture, and artifacts become equal players in her films. On view at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart is the three-part work series that the artist made at the Villa Massimo in Rome in 2023, “LA CASA,” which links fictitious Italian volcanic panoramas and Goethe’s empty library in Weimar.  Two videos and a leporello merge into a speculative Italian journey through time.

Stefan Vogel (b. 1981 in Fürth, lives in Leipzig) creates works and spatial situations that bring together language and material. He uses concrete, textiles, metal scaffolding, and organic materials as elements in his installations. The components behave like the verses and stanzas of a poem, adding further layers of meaning to the overall arrangement—line by line. The titles of the works further extend the literary reference. Like thought fragments taken from short sentences, or even just single words, they offer insight into Vogel’s poetic artistic approach and associative manner of working.