Iceberg Free City

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The Eisbergfreistadt ( Iceberg Free State ) is an art project that was created in 2007 and was first shown in the USA by Anglo-Saxon artists Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesneck , including in Boston , and in 2010 also in Europe.

The art project with its photomontages is based on the fictitious assumption that in the German inflation year 1923 an oversized iceberg loosened in the Arctic and went aground in the Baltic Sea off Lübeck . The Hanseatic League , so the story of the project, immediately began with the extensive marketing of the natural event and declared the iceberg in front of the gates to be a free trade zone . Although immediately accessible by airships , it is still not possible to set up an offshore financial center ... Kahn and Selesnick include the real graphic designer Wenzel Hablik in this fantasy , who in 1923 actually also designed emergency money for municipalities, but neither for the Eisbergfreistadt nor for the Hanseatic City of Lübeck which, from the point of view of the exhibition organizers, is the incarnation of the Old World . In the city you found “this expressionistic 1920s atmosphere [...] which is currently experiencing a revival in the USA, which was glamorous and a little scary, but productive for art,” said Nicholas Kahn. The project refers to the present, to the uncertainty of the economic situation, the speculative frenzy of the financial world as well as the ecological instability.

In 2008 Kahn and Selesneck received the AICA award for the project .

In 2010 the exhibition was shown in the Lübeck Overbeck Society , the art association of the Hanseatic city in the community gardens behind the Behnhaus .

Kahn and Selesnick have been working together since 1986, their works are in collections such as the Smithsonian , the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Philadelphia Museum of Art .

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Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Mark Feeney : Going with the floe In The Boston Globe , May 13, 2007 (English)
  2. ↑ So Thoemmes
  3. ↑ Michael Berger: "Eisbergfreistadt" In: Lübecker Nachrichten , April 10, 2010, p. 16 (digitized version) ( Memento from April 11, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
  4. ↑ Karin Lubowski: Between Fantasy and Reality  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: shz online, April 13, 2010@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.shz.de  
  5. ↑ Nicholas Kahn & Richard Selesnick in Artdaily.org (English)