In times of climate crisis, however, the modern building material, whose range of applications seems limitless, is always associated with the man-made disasters of this world. While Karl-Heinz Adler's moulded stone systems stand for the reinterpretation of the material in a time of reconstruction, the ambivalence between decay and preservation becomes the omnipresent theme of a musical and visual intervention in Carsten Nicolai's video ‘Betonschiff ohne Namen’.

For his photographs, Erasmus Schröter staged the bunkers of the ‘Atlantic Wall’, built from millions of tonnes of concrete and commissioned by the German occupation in 1942, in coloured light, creating an ambivalent atmosphere between past megalomania, threat and ridicule. This is intensified in the present in view of modern air-to-ground missiles, portable anti-tank weapons and military conflicts that have become more perfidious. Preservation and destruction, but also the great possibilities of creating something new from the past, have become a theme for the artist Marta Dyachenko and her sculptures made of moulded concrete in recent years. The complex relationship between nature and man and the socially constructed view of what is and will be is reflected in exemplary fashion in the artworks, which are combined with concrete as a building material characterised by opportunities and disasters in equal measure.

Karl-Heinz Adler (1927 Remtengrün/Vogtland - 2018 Dresden) was a painter, graphic artist and conceptual artist and is now considered one of the most outstanding representatives of concrete art in Germany. His paper collages, object layers, drawings and models for the moulded stone systems he had made from concrete can be seen in this exhibition.

Erasmus Schröter (1956 Leipzig - 2021 Leipzig) was a photographer who initially worked in Leipzig, from 1985 in Hamburg and from the mid-1990s back in Leipzig, whose motifs range from surreal-looking everyday GDR imagery to conceptual series full of subtlety and irony.

Carsten Nicolai (*1965 Karl-Marx-Stadt/Chemnitz, lives in Berlin) is a German media artist and musician (pseudonym Alva Noto) who works as a border crosser at the interface between visual art, science and music. His often large-scale audiovisual installations aim to make invisible phenomena such as sound and light frequencies tangible.

Marta Dyachenko (*1990 in Kiev, lives in Berlin) studied architecture, fine arts and sculpture in Berlin. Her installations of model-like sculptures in concrete raise questions about the relationship between nature and man as well as the socially constructed view of the landscape.