The Island at Marta
An educational-artistic concept
since 2020
The “Island at Marta” is a special place at the centre of the museum. A space for encounter and for creative exploration. Here the visitors can become active themselves, learn something about the themes of the exhibitions or just spend some time.
The room is a cooperation between an artist, the education and training department and the curator team. It accompanies the entire exhibition year, and changes according to the themes of the respective exhibition.
Adrien Tirtiaux
Adrien Tirtiaux was the first artist to conceive the “Island at Marta”. The Belgian artist was born in 1980 in Brussels and today lives in Antwerp. Audacious structures and radical space interventions characterize his artistic oeuvre. From 1998 to 2003 he studied architecture at the Catholic University of Louvain-La-Neuve in Belgium and, from 2003 to 2008, sculpture and performance at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. He was involved in numerous exhibitions in museums and in the public space, for example at the Manifesta 7 in 2008 in Rovereto, Italy. Tirtiaux had his first encounter with the Museum Marta Herford in 2017 within the framework of the exhibition “Revolution in red-yellow-blue”.
For every phase of the “Island at Marta” the artist developed a cartoon drawing that recalls the cover of “The Adventures of Tintin” comic series. The figures from the pen of the Belgian cartoonist Hergé are an important source of inspiration for Tirtiaux, also for other works. By quoting the clear, linear style of the cartoonist, and transferring it to his own work, he becomes part of the cosmos of heroes himself.
Here it was possible to investigate the materials glass and concrete, and explore their differences and their similarities. In supervised workshops, visitors were also able to mix and cast concrete. Somewhere between research lab, construction site and holiday paradise, a room was created to spend time, read, discuss and join in.
For the autumn and winter exhibition, the “Island at Marta” has been transformed into a darkroom: the podium was raised in order to shade the roof windows. The concrete pillars cast by the visitors were used as bearing columns for this. On a rail landscape at the centre of the room there are projectors throwing images on the walls. Visitors can participate actively in the drawing to create a joint work of art. All in the style of Saul Steinberg’s “The Line”, the picture motifs develop from a horizontal line that connects all.
With this exhibition, the “Island at Marta” enters the third and, for the time being, last phase: the room has been transformed into a sewing workshop. After the visitors to the previous exhibitions have poured the concrete columns and drawn the panorama of figures on the walls, they can now work with textiles, sew, cut, weave and draw here. Or you can go on stage and try on items of clothing, for example, that have been created in workshops with various artists and designers.
Dank
Förderer „Insel im Marta“
Marta partners
Many thanks to the Marta Herford Corporate Partners and Corporate Premium Partners as well as the Marta Fund for New Art for their ongoing support of our program.
