Bettina Pousttchi, 1971

German Iranian artist Bettina Pousttchi studied fine arts, philosophy, art history, and film theory in Paris and Cologne. Between 1995 and 1999, she worked with artists and academics Prof. Rosemarie Trockel and Prof. Gerhard Merz at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, and later completed the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2000.

Based in Berlin, Pousttchi has been creating monumental, site-specific installations for building façades and large-scale sculptures since the 2010s, responding to the architectural, social, and cultural dynamics of the spaces in which they are situated. In recent years, her sculptures and installations have incorporated urban elements often overlooked in cityscapes—such as street furniture, highway guardrails, metal barricades, street poles, and bollards—objects that shape our physical experience of urban space. Through techniques like bending or pressing, and by recoloring these materials, Pousttchi liberates them from their everyday functions and assigns them new meaning. She transforms these mundane objects into markers of fluid structures, movement, speed, and the blurring boundaries between public and private space in today’s increasingly expansive and densely populated global metropolises.

Pousttchi’s “Vertical Highways V02” sculpture takes its name from an eponymous series presented in the artist’s major solo exhibition at Berlinische Galerie in 2019. A version of this monumental work, identical in color, form, and scale, was installed in 2023 in the public square outside Berlin Central Station. For this nearly six-meter-tall sculpture, the artist bent and individually shaped a series of highway guardrails, assembling them into a dynamic form rendered in red. The materials she repeatedly uses refer both to minimalism and to Marcel Duchamp’s concept of the readymade. With its industrial components, the sculpture enters into dialogue with Istanbul Modern’s new building, while its intertwined vertical spirals reflect the complex, fluid, and ever-changing nature of the city of Istanbul, where the work will be installed.