Invitation to an Interaction

In 1985, shortly before the summer break, a flyer announcing an international call was distributed everywhere in Hamburg, including the independent artist-run space, Künstlerhaus Hamburg on Weidenallee, of which I was already a member at the time. The initiator of the biennale, Robert Filliou taught a couple of semesters as a guest professor at the HFBK. I had already graduated from the university, but participated in his Artists-in-Space Project a couple of times. This was an open workshop, which focused on increasing the presence of artists in outer space – a utopian proposition, but consistent with the idea that essential visions for the future arise from the realm of art. My main teachers at the HFBK were KP Brehmer and Georg Jappe. Later, both were also strongly involved in the realization of the Art-of-Peace Biennale. The exhibition was organized by the curator, gallerist, and collector René Block, who, like Filliou, had close ties to the Fluxus movement and was very well connected internationally. A whole bunch of students and professors from the HFBK, as well as other artists, were also involved.

On the one hand, I found the connection with Fluxus, with Joseph Beuys, and all the people associated to it very exciting, as well as the fact that it was such an open, international project. The Fluxus movement was not only very interdisciplinary, but also active in many places from Europe and the United States to Japan. For me, Beuys’s conflation of art and life and his expanded concept of art defined by the term social sculpture were core aesthetic ideas. But, above all, the theme of the Biennale appealed to me, and I really wanted to be part of it. At the time, I was only just starting out as an artist and hadn’t yet taken part in any larger exhibitions outside of the HFBK, but I was working and experimenting a lot. I thought of nothing else for the entire summer: peace, peace, peace, peace – what is peace? The challenge was to develop a concept that answered this question. And my aspiration was to formulate an idea that was as simple and clear as possible. But the longer I thought about it, the more difficult it became.

It was the day before the deadline and I was sure that I wouldn’t be able to find a coherent, concise visualization for peace that would exactly capture the point. I vividly recall sitting on the edge of my bed that night feeling slightly depressed and thinking of giving up. Then I suddenly saw the image before me: a cat’s cradle string game. It came straight out of everyday life. I had hung laundry on a red clothesline and drawn two hands on the wall for another artwork. I knew then that this was exactly the simple idea I had been looking for. It is an invitation to play and literally also an invitation to co-create, and it is a game without winners. For me it entails a mutual give and take that I associate with peace. The form of the string game is something very concrete for a concept that is initially very abstract. The activity of two or more people alternately taking a thread and passing it on is a multidimensional transformation in space that also has a processual, temporal level. Giving peace a form: I took this quite literally.

The next day – the day of the deadline – I immediately made a model on a folding card. I drew two hands on both sides with threads passing between them. When you opened the card, the threads pulled taut. I sent it away in an A4 envelope. It would have also been possible to participate in the open call with mail art, fax messages, or postcards. I then actually received a written invitation to install the work on site. They could have accepted the card as mail art, but I was asked to realize it in the exhibition space.

It was a wonderful experience! A lot of artists traveled to Hamburg and worked together in setting up the Biennale. The atmosphere was exciting, and there were many international guests. Among many others, KP, Tonia Kudrass, Anna Oppermann, and Herbert Hossmann participated as artists from Hamburg. Sol LeWitt, Allan Kaprow, and other artists joined from the US. I got to know a lot of those present and had some delightful encounters, such as with the Fluxus artist Alison Knowles. Sol LeWitt had the idea to paint a circle on the wall in which all the participants could draw a line in their own individual way. I myself drew a circle inside the circle. The catalogue was produced in a very short timeframe with in-situ images from the exhibition. At the opening, the atmosphere was also very joyful and relaxed. The Biennale was accompanied by an extensive program, including a concert at the HFBK. At the Hamburg Kunsthalle, lectures and speeches by Emmett Williams and others took place. Essentially, the Art-of-Peace Biennale achieved exactly what I wanted to express with my string game and what I perceived as the solution to the problem: this mutual give and take, which was also visible in the collaboration between the different institutions.

Yes, it was, but ultimately it remained a temporary project that was realized in very little time and with very little money, around 100,000 Deutschmark from the funds of Woche der bildenden Kunst (Week of Fine Arts). Many artists were present during the installation phase, but of course not all of those from out of town stayed for the one-month duration of the exhibition. Unfortunately, some of the protagonists were already in poor health. Robert Filliou fell seriously ill before the opening and withdrew to a Buddhist monastery in France. Beuys died at the beginning of 1986, Filliou at the end of 1987. There was a rather tragic chain of events that made it difficult to continue the project because some of the central figures were missing and no major institution was interested in further pursuing it. The Biennale had a lot to do with Filliou’s personality. After all, he believed that artists were supposed to be in outer space since they were the utopian spirits.

Art in general revolves a lot around utopias. Georg Jappe once said, “Without utopias we would still be living without fire.” Imagining something, conceiving something, and the associated desire for knowledge and independent research: These are not only artistic, but also genuinely human objectives. Human creativity and its potential is based on the freedom of exploration in an imaginary space and the capacity of taking an idea further, and imagining things that might be. Today, we are again faced with the question of how we want to proceed in terms of our humanitarian values and humanity as a whole. Today we need all the more imagination because we are about to lose our common thread. Compared to the situation in 1985, an additional danger is the conquest of the digital space, where AI is increasingly taking over the creative act. Nobody is capable of keeping track of everything anymore. In my view, the loss of coherence is extremely dangerous: the dissolution of reality as a palpable space of action. When we can no longer see the bigger picture, we also destroy the sense of interconnectedness. As an artist, I have always been committed to creating interrelationships and to protecting these.

This also has a very practical dimension. I’ve never regarded myself so much as an individual artist, but have always been more strongly focused on collective activity, not thinking primarily about my art production, but about art per se. Although imagination and the creative activity as such are limited to the individual, there is always an outward perspective: working as an artist means establishing contact to the broader field of art and the outside world. To return to my contribution to the Biennale, the tension of the work really lies in the thread and in the transition from the surface to the space, from the figure to abstraction, or from one person to another in a joint interaction. My love for the simple, the concrete, for openness, and a certain form of abstraction has remained a core element of my work to this day. Ultimately, all effective art is an invitation to engage with it through reflection and participation: Participating means you are a part of it and you give something of yourself, waiting for resonance. In this respect, the Art-of-Peace Biennale was a wonderful start for me, particularly in terms of its focus. In the past 40 years, both in my work as an artist and in my social environment, I have tried to create interconnections in the concrete, societal space as well as in the imaginary space of art. My aim has always been to encourage participatory reflection and to explore how interaction works.

Peace is seemingly a finite state that we long for when there is war and that we take for granted when it has temporarily become part of everyday life. The fact that the state of peaceful coexistence has to be continuously reestablished is often overlooked. Peace is an active process that requires incessant action and creation.

The conversation between Belinda Grace Gardner and Sabine Mohr took place on September 29, 2024, in Hamburg.

Sabine Mohr lives and works in Hamburg. She has been a member of the Künstlerhaus Hamburg since 1985, from which the Künstler*innenhaus and Abbildungszentrum FRISE emerged in Hamburg in 2003.