As a painter, filmmaker, and photographer, Ulrike Ottinger has created an entire artistic universe, a Cosmos Ottinger. Her transdisciplinary approach is groundbreaking today but Ottinger is also a pioneer of queer art, post-colonial criticism, and the confrontation with fascism and persecution. These questions are all still urgent today: How can we locate contemporary feminist, queer, and aesthetic debates historically? And how does one situate these debates in a museum setting? The catalogue, edited by the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, documents this part of her work but also addresses these theoretical and art historical questions raised by Ottinger's searching and investigative approach.

The sensual and simultaneously conceptual visual creations of the Berlin-based painter and sculptor Detlef Waschkau generate space and interspace between mediums and materials. He juggles with contradictions, the hardness of wood, the delicacy of painting, figuration and abstraction, harmony and dissonance, the reflectivity of light, and space and color. The artistic home of the Berlin-based artists is life in metropolises, the never-resting organism of big cities, seas of buildings, urban canyons, asphalt, and big city jungle. For Detlef Waschkau, the city is a grand stage. In the exhibition publication, New York, Beijing, and Berlin come together-dense street chaos, everything colliding: a picture of the everyday confrontation of people and city.