What about art in public sphere? Difficult, that’s how we experience it most of the time, either an ideological contempt, a political agenda, or just plain ugly.

Recently we were standing in one of the early sculptures of Dan Graham at a private collection in Ghent, Belgium. In some sort of way it operated like a time machine. We knew the pictures which were made inside of with the collectors’ couple dozens of years ago. Now we were standing there together with our little daughter and got photographed by the collector. However, what about the work of Graham, forgotten in Berlin? Of course, here in Mitte, just around the corner, there’s the cafe of Kunst-Werke, the art hub on Auguststrasse: two gigantic cubes looking away from each other. Toda, however, we made a pilgrimage to the Pavilion made by the artist at the Vattenfall  powerstation. What happens to those wonderful outdoor sculptures? They get forgotten...

Dan Graham’s pavilion is an oval, constructed out of perforated steel sheet at one side and out of beautifully bended mirroring glass on the other side. The installation stands on a wooden platform which is elevated from an empty concrete basin and it can be entered over a long wooden runway.

Is it meant to have water around it? Did Graham design it as an empty fountain on purpose, a sculpture forgotten in an urban desert? The art work of Dan Graham stands lonely and dusty in front on Vattenfall, one of Europe’s leading energy companies.