Cancelled (but reinvented), Performance at Maidan Square, Kyiv
Dirk Großer, visual artist and curator, was born in Dresden in 1970. After expeditions (including Madagascar, Malawi, Myanmar) and a few trekking tours (Erciyes Dagi, Kilimanjaro, Himalayas), he completed his art studies (painting, graphics) at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden from 1995 to 2000. From 2001 to 2003 he was a master student with Hans Peter Adamski and lived and worked in Tel Aviv. He documented the mood in Israel during the parliamentary elections, the beginning of the Gulf War and the wave of terrorist attacks that increased as a result. The key experience was the defusing of an explosive device, which he observed from the balcony of his apartment and which he interpreted in the illuminated object “Object Found”.
Dirk Großer works in a project-oriented manner. His actions, installations and performances are based on socially explosive themes in the context of philosophical concepts of freedom. For example the projects “Where I’m going, film project Babel”, “Heldenplatz” and “Operating System Terror”. In the project “Terminal of Freedom” he portrayed people from different social backrounds about their own vision of freedom. These cinematic portraits are installed in various institutions in combination with blueprints of society. In addition, Dirk Großer gives lecture performances in which art history appears as a freedom movement due to new perspectives since 9/11. Most recently at the Bauhaus Reuse Berlin as a live stream and at the International Conference PERSPECTIVES at the Faculty of Art and Design, Usti nad Labem, as well as on the NIB-Art stage in Dresden. In 2021 Dirk curated the exhibition “Emergency Break” for the 30th anniversary of the New Saxon Art Association in the Albrechtsburg Meissen, the art installations “Rausstellung” for the NIB Art Festival in Dresden and the exhibition “Draw to Live” in the Galerie Mitte, Dresden. For his current film project in Ukraine he organizes Art and War Conferences on the role of art in times of war and portrays artists and activists in the resistance against the Russian invasion.