22.05.–27.06.1993

Dennis Adams, born 1948 in Des Moines, Iowa, USA, lives in New York. Since installing his first work in public space in 1978 - across ten facade windows of a multi-storey car-park in Manhattan - he is preoccupied with recontextualising large-formatted photographs in public urban space: i.e. he mainly uses found picture motifs which acquire a new meaning in the context of the installation and the respective site. His strategy aims at allowing insights into the political unconscious of specific urban contexts in which the works are placed. A number of his interventions are inscribed in existing public facilities such as bus stops, kiosks, street signs, public urinals, etc.

Dennis Adams creates two industrial container for Portikus which, on the one hand, make exact reference to the architectural proportions of Portikus' container structure (the scale being 1/27th of the given volume in each); on the other hand, they allude to the different functions the containers currently have: as refuse container, storage room, office, information centre, housing for immigrants, and asylum for homeless persons. One of the two containers receives a transparent photograph showing a run-down stadium.

Parallel to this, in the studio space of Portikus, Adams exhibits the model of a "Refreshment Kiosk for an Immigrant Worker" as suggestion to possibly be realised in Frankfurt's urban space.

Photos: Katrin Schilling