Olaf Kuhnemann: Bicycle Temple

The bicycles around which this installation is built are associated with the inspiration Olaf Kuhnemann draws from the streets of Berlin – the city he is residing in recent years. As the seasons change, with winter's depression replaced by the mania of spring and summer, the city's boulevards fill with bicycles. Kuhnemann sees them as "street jewels," bringing freedom and beauty to Berlin's urban space: "the bicycles that really capture my attentionare usually very old, showing the passage of time, the impact of the weather. They are very personal bicycles designed or built by their owners, who create the exact opposite of the new, the glittery, and the sleek."

As he walks the streets, Kuhnemann finds abandoned, dismantled bicycles which he salvages and restores, always using only other salvaged parts. He photographs them, posting "painterly" compositions on Instagram. The process of restoring to life the "dead" bicycles,  which are then sometimes given to a friend or another artist, encodes layers of obsession, passion, reflection, beauty, and freedom. The bicycles embody the beauty inherent in the act of artistic creation. The bicycle drawings presented as part of the project provide a "backdrop" for the real bicycles, creating a reservoir of images that serve Kuhnemann to elicit questions, thoughts, and feelings.

These images are resonant with the act of strolling, itself founded on a clash between order and a systematic approach, and chance, spontaneity, and deviation from utilitarian logic. In this sense, Kuhnemann's work brings to mind the situationist movement, which sought to create a new, impermanent system abounding in imagination and chance ("situationist") linkages, as an alternative to institutionalized links and as an expression of resistance to the society of the spectacle, with its discipline and oppressive apparatuses.

The charm of strolling resides in the experience of discovery that it allows. In this context, historian Boaz Neuman wrote: "As you stroll, any street […] can become magical and mysterious. With his unfocused gaze the stroller can expose that which is below the surface, like a camera capturing things that the eye misses. The stroller uncovers the city's unconscious." Or, in Kuhnemann's words: "I step outside but then I run into bicycles, some cry for restoration, some are beautiful and call on me to photograph them and disrupt the linearity and the goal I had in mind when coming out of my house – like inspired diversions that must be collected."

For Kuhnemann, the act of collecting and restoring bicycles is a subversive one that is integrated with the counter culture prevalent in his neighborhood of Kreuzberg, an assertion of independent political power in the face of the capitalist system and the economic forces that set the city in motion. In his words, "the bicycle allows us freedom to move with our bodies through space in an unanticipated and fluid manner. The freedom to be diverted and pause to appreciate shape, beauty, color. The freedom to 'waste' time, to give away, without monetary compensation, a bicycle that has resumed functioning. The freedom to walk, to stroll without a clear objective in order to bump into glorious bicycles that create moments of joy, inspiration, and reflection." 

Kuhnemann sees in his Instagram profile an integral part of his work:  olafkuhnemann.bicycle.