Beate Kuhn, Gefässschale aus vier Schalensegmenten ca. 1984

When designing his works, Florian Slotawa—winner of the Kunsthalle Mannheim’s Hector Prize in 2000—draws exclusively on existing objects belonging to both himself and others, which he then removes from their original context. Without changing the objects themselves, he arranges and places them in new relations for a specific period.

For the Kunsthalle Mannheim, Slotawa selected a number of artifacts from the museum’s own ceramic collection and presented them in his exhibition Collective Property in 2002. The unusual aspect: the artist augmented the pieces with personal items from the museum staff. Slotawa appropriated the artistic and everyday objects, combining and stacking them in order to establish a common presentation height. The improvised pedestal is suggestive of the elevation of the artwork’s importance. Thus the valuable ceramic is juxtaposed to the everyday objects, which also have a personal value for the owners. Slotawa subsequently documented the arrangement photographically.