Bettina Pousttchi

Bettina Pousttchi (b. 1971, Mainz) is a German-Iranian artist who lives and works in Berlin. Working across sculpture, photography and large-scale architectural interventions, her practice examines the structures through which public space, movement and time are organised. She frequently draws on familiar elements of the urban environment, transforming objects and architectures whose functions are normally so embedded in everyday life that they pass almost unnoticed.

In her sculptural work, Pousttchi uses objects such as guardrails, street bollards, bicycle stands and crowd-control barriers, mechanically bending, compressing and reshaping them. Stripped of their original regulatory function, these rigid structures become unexpectedly fluid and dynamic. The resulting sculptures explore transformation and the dissolution of boundaries, while retaining traces of the systems of movement, orientation and control from which they originate. Her ongoing Vertical Highways series, begun in 2019, is particularly characteristic of this approach, turning horizontally oriented highway guardrails into upright, almost architectural forms.

Questions of space are closely connected to questions of time throughout Pousttchi’s practice. In World Time Clock, begun in 2008, she photographed public clocks in cities across the world at the same local time, 1:55 p.m., creating a global portrait of the political and social organisation of time. Her monumental photographic interventions similarly transform buildings in response to their particular architectural, urban and historical contexts, temporarily altering how familiar structures are perceived.

Pousttchi studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf with Rosemarie Trockel and Gerhard Merz before participating in the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York. She has participated twice in the Venice Biennale, in 2003 and 2009, and her work has been presented internationally at institutions including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Berlinische Galerie, Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, Kunsthalle Basel and Haus Konstruktiv in Zürich. Her works are held in numerous public collections, including the Hirshhorn Museum, the Phillips Collection, Berlinische Galerie, Albertina Vienna and the Federal Collection of Contemporary Art in Germany.