14/03/2026 – 14/03/2026, 10:00 am,

Abdoul Karim Martens + Dominik Sartor: dérivedérive

, Stadthausgalerie Münster (hosted by Kunsthalle Münster)

Location: Hoppengarten / Acker, Hoppengarten 20, 48147 Münster

Duration: 10:00 am – 6:00 pm

"The sudden change of ambiance in a street within the space of a few meters; the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres; the path of least resistance that is automatically followed in aimless strolls."

Guy Debord, 1955

dérivedérive is a temporary intervention in public space by Abdoul Karim Martens and Dominik Sartor. Drawing on Guy Debord’s notion of the "dérive"—a mode of drifting through the city guided by its atmospheres—the work approaches urban space as a network of affects, encounters, and latent tensions. It proposes a suspension of utility in order to follow the moods of a place, while asserting the city as a collectively shaped environment: in resisting privatization and mere capitalist circulation, the work reclaims urban space as a site of shared experience, resources, and participation.

Invoking the right to the city (Henri Lefebvre), the artists install a freestanding, mobile white wall for a few hours at urban sites—at Münster’s harbor, a cultural quarter shaped by its historic industrial buildings, and at Hoppengarten, on a collectively cultivated urban field organized by the initiative Erntezeit, opposite the former Heerde-Kolleg. The wall blocks no passage and restricts no use; instead, it inserts itself into the existing infrastructure as a subtle interruption, carrying the artists’ works on its surface. Installed for a limited duration and fully reversible, dérivedérive leaves no physical trace once dismantled. Yet it subtly redirects perception, sharpening attention to the micro-shifts, divisions, and ambiences that structure the everyday.

In Münster, the work appears for the first time within an institutional framework, turning the white cube inside out: while the exhibition space functions as a storage site—the wrapped wall and artworks rest on a wagon inside the gallery—the outside is activated for a temporary and mobile showing of art. Departing from the Stadthausgalerie in the morning, the artists roll the wagon through the city and assemble the wall in situ to show their works, when, in the evening, they deinstall the installation and bring it back to Stadthausgalerie.

Abdoul Karim Martens (b. 1988) lives and works in Cologne. His work explores connections and processual states of becoming that emerge from the interplay of materials, forms, and discursive references. Through layering, erosion, and the transformation of multiple elements, he develops organic structures that bear traces of the past while evoking worlds yet to be imagined. The tangible and the ephemeral interweave in a realm where the concrete continuously merges into the abstract.

Dominik Sartor (b. 1979) lives and works in Cologne. Central to his practice is painting as a narrative medium. Through an intensive, materially grounded process, surfaces condense into pictorial spaces from which figures and landscapes emerge from the image itself. His works unfold as stages, gradually revealing themselves through sustained looking, where reality and imagination come together to form a distinct pictorial presence. Here, material density and figural clarity find a balance, and abstraction and figuration become perceptible as two moments of the same painterly process.