Across their three different approaches, media, and generations, one overarching question remains: How can something appear so rich in history that it seems to predate its own creation? Even Haus Mödrath offers interesting answers to this question. Built around 1830, this classicist manor house has changed identities several times over its turbulent history, for example being used as a Nazi training center during World War II, but afterwards also as a children’s home. Today it stands alone, as after 1956 the village of Mödrath was relocated to make room for the lignite mine of Frechen – now abandoned. As the only extant structure in the area, the building has lost its place, becoming the type of object these artists explore both concretely and metaphorically.

Hubert Kiecol takes the house – and all its spatial conditions of light, emptiness, density, and materiality – as the starting point for a bespoke selection from his sculptural work so far. Starting in the 1970s, he has been distilling the archaic in ways that resonate with the basic elements of quotidian architecture: houses, stairs, windows, hallways, furniture. Yet through Kiecol’s reduced translation into objects of concrete, steel, and paint, these signs of habitation and “being-in-the-world” are relieved of everyday function, instead condensing into material presences laden with feeling. Kiecol reflectively juxtaposes these with partly unpublished works on paper, as well as the landscape in which Haus Mödrath itself is embedded.

Born during World War II, Ursula Schulz-Dornburg experienced the devastation of the war and post-war years herself. Loss and the traces history leaves behind play just as crucial parts in her work as the human desire for shelter and protection. In her first series of photographs, from 1969, she observed children build huts on an adventure playground in Amsterdam. Later, she kept traveling eastward, documenting wooden buildings on the banks of the Bosporus, the ruins of Palmyra, or abandoned Soviet nuclear test sites in Kazakhstan. With an eye that is as sober as it is elegiac, and transcending the usual boundaries of photography, she connects different places and times to render visible what she calls the “verticality” of time. The arc of this exhibition, curated by Martin Germann in collaboration with Leo Goxhuli and Harald Spengler, ends at what is now the Georgia–Azerbaijan border, where Christian monks first started hewing caves into a cliff face in the 6th century.

For the top floor of Haus Mödrath – closest to the sky – Behrang Karimi developed an intimate installation of his own paintings, found objects, architectural elements, and sound. His paintings feature passages, windows and figures that all remain suspended, as though mired in time. A personal thread also leads to Iran’s Shiraz Arts Festival, which Karimi’s father attended several times and where Karlheinz Stockhausen, born in Haus Mödrath, performed in 1972. What seemed possible back then in Persepolis – a cosmopolitan exchange between artists of different backgrounds and disciplines – returns here both as a memory and simultaneously as opening possibilities for the future.

(Text Website: Haus Mödrath, 2026)

Further information about the exhibition can be found here.

Discover the availabe works by Hubert Kiecol at Häusler Contemporary here: