We’re very pleased to present KOTTI, Ursula Döbereiner’s third solo exhibition, at SEPTEMBER.
In her drawings, Ursula Döbereiner investigates the construction of public and private space in various ways. Döbereiner is interested in how collective social ideas, as well as individual private wishes, fears, and longings, are manifested in media images and advertising, on surfaces, in architectures, and in urban-planning decisions.

Her drawing installation KOTTI is inspired by the place in which Döbereiner lives and works, Kottbuss Gate in Berlin-Kreuzberg. The strange balconies of the high-rise buildings, recalling witches’ houses, “Möbel Olfe,” “Südblock,” the bars, restaurants, club rooms, and bars that have sprung up in the concrete architecture of the “New Kreuzberg Center,” form the setting for a mood reflecting both departure and crisis. More than a year ago, the Kotti & Co tenants’ association built overnight, as it were, a Gecekondu – a wooden barracks serving as a meeting point and protest center that has continually been expanded.

Pressing social issues are negotiated on the street here: class differences, asylum policy, racism, homophobia, urban planning. There are various reasons why new kinds of multicultural exchange and community projects have been able to develop here of all places, amidst a “notorious” high-rise complex and at one of the main hard drug dealing hubs in the city. Paradoxically, the “failed” architecture of the high-rise block from the 1970s has been a contributing factor. For nearly 20 years, the area with its passages and bazaar-like squares had gone to seed. Subsequently, it was diverted from its intended use and revived by alternative projects and meeting points.

This very idea of taking what is already there and appropriating it in a different context characterizes Ursula Döbereiner’s work. For KOTTI, she transforms details of architecture, stand-up displays, protest stickers, and advertising for Turkish telecommunications providers into a space-filling drawing installation. Her large- format digital newspaper prints are wallpapered in clusters over doors, electrical outlets, oriels, and corners in the room. On the individual prints, motifs of the Kottbuss Gate are overlain in serial arrangement, in long shots or close-ups, with front and rear views. The space itself becomes the image carrier. Döbereiner produces an enterable drawing in which the visitor can – even more consistently than, say, when viewing a film – absorb different spatial and temporal perspectives. In addition, the shifting and dislocation of the motifs gives rise to a flitting all-over in which empty spaces and interstices repeatedly emerge. On these digital wall works, in turn, hand drawings are installed based on the drawings made on the computer. At the same time, animations of the KOTTI motifs are shown on a monitor inserted in the wall work.

Döbereiner also uses the medium of drawing to create and comment on space. In the work social, abstract, and architectural spaces are overlain, giving rise to a realm of thought or psychology in which political or philosophical themes can be negotiated, as well as the possibilities of the medium of drawing itself.