_ Kuball ’s works encompass objects, installations, and interventions that reflect on visual organization, its impact on consciousness and on outlook on the world. His works can be found in white cubes and black boxes, in all kinds of exhibitions spaces as well as in public spaces; they can be temporary as well as permanent.
With an interdisciplinary approach joining artistic, scientific, social and political aspects, his works respond to the complex dynamics of societal, ethical and esthetical organization. One of his referential features is the quoting and recontextualization of cultural icons. Another is, that many of his interventions are conditioned on the participation of the audience to interact with the artistic setting. He furthers the idea that Robert Irwin coined as “Conditional Art”: The idea is not for work for a place or a context, but of making it itself the material and the object of artistic processing.
Kuball’s works in public space interfere with the co-constitutional process of public scope, public values and public practice. They are statements contributing to the ongoing negotiations between public space, political culture and civic responsibility. Unlike László Moholy-Nagy who was fascinated by the scale of lighting fixtures and translated his proposals for stage into urban environment and unlike Nikolas Schoeffer who experimented with “lumino-dynamic” systems in public space, point of departure for Kuball is a conceptual idea. One of the reoccurring parameters of his artistic settings is the reflected impact of light.
He has been working with light as a building, as a drawing (like photo- and videography) and as a performative material. His artistic research is geared to the relevance of light in contemporary visual codes and their implications. He refers to signature qualities of light like non-locality and time flow, intermediality and perception-responsiveness. Since the beginning of the 20th Century, worldwide a growing number of artists works on light as the medium governing the visual sphere. Instead of working with materials like marble, canvas or bronze, the medium hosting the artwork advanced to the center of artistic interest. Due to his extended oeuvre and the continuous, long-term international display, Mischa Kuball has become a leading voice in Europe. He holds a professorship at the University of Media Arts in Cologne, he is engaged in the development of the “Center for International Light Art” in Unna/Ruhr and, along with Otto Piene and Brigitte Kowanz, he is one of the awardees of the “German Light Art Award” by the Art Museum Celle.