A project by Heiner Blum and Jakob Sturm with guests
in collaboration with Lotte Dinse and Selina Hammer
co-produced with Diamant / Museum Of Urban Culture and Orte möglichen Wohnen

The historical villa housing the Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden was designed as a residential building with apartments at the end of the 19th century. Engaging with the building's original function and significance, the Kunstverein is implementing a participatory exhibition project within the framework of the cooperative project Interior, exploring the theme of living spaces.

With Moving Boxes, the rooms transform into a vibrant stage for experiments in living, everyday life, exchange, and encounters. The project examines the communicative and social potential of the site in collaboration with invited artists, the audience, and various stakeholders.

Throughout our lives, we often change the places where we live. It's not only furniture that moves but also the myriad small and large items we surround ourselves with. Carefully packed into moving boxes, these objects change locations to be reactivated in new settings. Moving boxes are essential carriers of the items that accompany our biographies.

The Moving Boxes project gives these boxes a stage. They symbolize both literally and metaphorically the mobility of people in our time. What if these boxes were not just means of transport but also served as spaces in various formats? In an era of rising housing costs, boxes open up intriguing possibilities for rethinking living spaces. What would it be like to live, work, celebrate, linger, and dream—alone, with friends, or strangers—in a box? Moving Boxes explores these questions in a model-like approach.

Many people share the childhood memory of a large box—perhaps left behind after a household appliance delivery—that became a temporary dwelling, a play area, a hiding spot, or a space of endless possibilities. This sense of freedom and empowerment tied to a large, yet confined space is reawakened with Moving Boxes.

For the project, an oversized, specially designed, multi-component box system creates diverse room-within-a-room situations across the floors of the Nassauischer Kunstverein. Over several weeks, the Kunstverein transforms into ever-changing scenarios of spatial appropriation and reuse.

What initially resembles an untouched Minimal Art arrangement — think of Raum 19 by Imi Knoebel, cardboard sculptures by Charlotte Posenenske, or serial cube arrangements by Donald Judd — evolves into an open, anarchic setting where observers become participants, designers, and inhabitants.

The Moving Boxes complement and subvert the Kunstverein’s white cube, forming an open, creative substructure. Like structures on a beach, new forms are built and tested one day, only for the space to reset the next. Week by week, guest artists, regional initiatives, associations, creative groups, and individuals bring intergenerational and intercultural impulses to the project.

Amid this constant change, several active focal points accompany the process:

The Kiosk Box provides guests with drinks and snacks and offers tools and materials.

Throughout the project, visitors are invited to write their thoughts and demands on prepared demonstration signs addressing housing issues.

The Wallpaper Gallery, through poster installations, presents historical, sociocultural, and artistic perspectives on housing and urbanity.

Moving Boxes is a constantly evolving, open space for possibilities—hosting rest and activity, lectures, discussions, performances, club and cinema evenings, and ideas yet to be invented.

Moving Boxes is part of the multi-institutional cooperative project Interior, where six cultural institutions in the Rhine-Main region reflect on their history as former residential buildings.

Heiner Blum works as an artist in white cube contexts as well as in sociocultural environments.

Jakob Sturm is an artist, author, and curator focused on creating spaces.

Lotte Dinse is a cultural scientist, curator of contemporary art, and director of the Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden since July 2024.

Selina Hammer is an artist who led the Festival Ensemble in 2023, bridging art and music.

Links

Heiner Blum
heinerblum.de
instagram.com/heinerblum/

Jakob Sturm
jakobsturm.com

Nassauischer Kunstverein
kunstverein-wiesbaden.de
instagram.com/kunstverein.wiesbaden/

Selina Hammer
instagram.com/slnhammer/

INTERIOR
kunstverein-wiesbaden.de/details/interior-kooperation-2024

Diamant / Museum Of Urban Culture
heinerblum.de/situative-projekte/diamant
instagram.com/diamant.offenbach/­­­