Horses moving through Berlin’s urban space between organic-​​looking multicolored architectural structures, orange and palm trees on the banks of the Spree, wild plantings on residential hills, concrete surfaces, and towers. Such images evoke irritation and invite us to pause, but also elicit dreams and speculation about other future designs and uses of urban spaces. In her series of large-​format building signs, which have been mounted in different outdoor spaces in Berlin (Princess Towers (2019), Treptown Visions (2019), Bethanien-Höfe (2019)) and Bingen (Welterbe-​Parkhaus (2020)) as well as presented in gallery spaces (Mont Femott (2020)), Dorothea Nold devises visions for an architecture of the future: for living together in the city, for ecological challenges, and for possible symbiotic connections between man and nature with the built environment. The artist’s ceramics form the basis for the intensely colorful collages, which she combines as architectural models with sketches and photo snippets. The latter, in turn, relate people, animals, objects, and Nold’s other artworks to one another, creating a montage with photographic material from the respective urban environment. It is important to question one’s own desires and the consequences thereof when beholding these works and thereby to withstand a certain discomfort: the depicted scenarios and architectural structures are not only functional and modernistic, but, on the contrary, they arouse or serve desires for an ecological city designed with the needs of people in mind. Yet they also represent luxurious real estate development and the disappearance of the last remaining urban brownfields. Last but not least, the style and design of the signs, which are based on those from actual construction projects found in many places, refer to the threat of ongoing gentrification and the selling out of urban space to developers: the artist named her fictive construction firm “Schark Immo”—an obvious allusion to the English word shark. Immo Schark = real estate shark. Conversely, the fictive construction project Mont Femott—Neubebauung ehemaliges Humboldtforum Berlin, finan­ziert von Common Funds [Mont Femott—residential development on the site of the former Humboldt­forum Berlin, financed through Common Funds]: the green residential hill, which is to replace the politically controversial Humboldt­forum building project in the center of Berlin from 2023, brings together everything that makes the feminist pulse quicken: inclusive, communal, and affordable living and working models designed for the different, individual needs of its residents, centrally located and simultaneously a green recrea­tion area, organically designed and ecologically convincing.

With the building sign series, the artist intervenes in current political discussions about the increasing commercialization and gentrification of cities and demands the radical redesign of urban space towards inclusive, solidary, collective, and anti-discriminatory practices. At the same time, the series bears testament to the sensual ideas of the artist, who proposes to regard architecture not as a foreign body, but rather as an extension of the human body, as a holistic experience that integrates social and ecological questions, as well as a place that enables relations and encounters, and only creates its form and structure as a result. In this series, as with her other works, Dorothea Nold never loses herself in pure aesthetic considerations and realizations. Instead, she makes reference to her surrounding environment and the respective socio-political contexts that she has observed, experienced, and reflected upon accordingly​—not only in places where she has temporarily resided in recent years like Paris, Xi’an, Kabul, Istanbul, and Berlin, but also on her trips and short-term stays in Mali, Senegal, Iran, Mongolia, China, as well as numerous other locations. In each case, the artist finds a particular material, conceptual, and aesthetic form and artistic translation primarily for the ambivalence of contradictory experiences and observations. When selecting specific materialities and forms for her work, Dorothea Nold is guided by questions about attributions from the outside and one’s own positioning within it, as well as, in principle, about the functioning of interpersonal relationships and encounters in different spaces and contexts. On the other hand, the attentive movement and observation of/in the surrounding environment—the materialities, architectures, nature, patterns and structures—leads to these opening up from the material.

At first glance, it is often rough, brittle materials that she uses for her sculptural works, such as those that can be found above all in urban space: concrete, metal and wood (remnants), but also controlled, man-made greenery (as in the work Grundkreisrund (2009)). In their aesthetics, her ceramics work against the fragility of the materials: like the most recent aluminum sculptures, they, too, establish a reference to the urban and evoke the built environment, which combines with the organic, and open up a vision for a future urbanity. The found architectures, structures, and patterns are spun into absurdity. Nevertheless, moments of real possibilities of the how and where of future living and (communal) living together consistently flare up here.

The installation entwoder (2013) arose from the difficult sensation of integrating oneself into a foreign city, which should become a place where you live and work, making it your own and becoming a part of it. In an artist talk given on the occasion of her solo exhibition by the same name at alpha nova & galerie futura, Dorothea Nold describes her experience of always being assigned a clear position in (social) structures, which, despite effort, she was barely able to change and that functioned like an invisible wall, like a barrier, which she continually comes up against again and again. The feeling of powerlessness to transcend the self- or externally imposed barriers can induce feelings of sadness, despair, and anger. However, barriers are never stable, but always something created, something imagined, which certainly can be shifted or even dismantled.

The installation entwoder consists of a seemingly stable wooden partition that divides the gallery space into two equal halves. A motor ensures that the wall tilts sometimes to the right, sometimes to the left, thus moving between the two sides. The tipping of the wall irritates and disturbs the notion of stability, questioning the dichotomy of two equal sides and evoking an uncertainty that makes one’s own perception and attitude no longer seem secure. The wall’s appearance and workmanship also speaks to its own fragility: it is cobbled together, irregular—like the identity and positioning of the observer themselves. Thus entwoder becomes a game with the barriers and borderlines in and between our societies and the spaces that these demarcations install. Spaces that so often only suggest the possibility of the either/or. Often unquestioned, the respective environment is only thought of, perceived, and acted upon in oppositions, i.e. dichotomously: female-male, us-the others, our space-your space. What happens when these oppositions are irritated and displaced? The purposefully binary division of space takes up the familiar and seemingly natural—or codified—roles, positions, and barriers that primarily shape thinking. In this sense, the installation reinforces binary structures while simultaneously making thinking in opposites the subject—or rather literally shaking them up, irritating them. Where are the spaces between, the ambiguities? In the best case, the feeling of distress induced by the tilting wall awakens the desire for a self-​empowering change of perspective and position. Irritation, illusion, and deception are also the focus of the work Birdcage (installation, collages, 2010), as well as Hochzeitsnacht [Wedding Night] (performance, installation, 2010). During her stay in China, the many wedding photographers offering their services everywhere attracted her attention. The marketing of love as a commodity through the form of reproduced images showing gender-conforming, hetero­sexual constellations and bodies staged in supposedly romantic settings is a thoroughly capitalistic and hegemonic practice. The high degree of artifice inherent in the images and the event of the wedding itself arouses and serves desires while also reproducing gender stereotypes and clichОs: the bride in white, made-up, styled, “pure” and strongly sexualized at the same time. In both works, Dorothea Nold pursues the public staging of interpersonal relationships as well as the symbolically charged imaginings associated with the marriage ritual—not only in China, of course, but global in its deeply rooted social symbolism while diverse in type and form. In a series of collages showing different parts of composited women’s faces, she breaks with the hegemonic ideals of female beauty—white, young, undamaged—opposing them with non-white, non-young, and injured bodies, destroying conventional perspectives through the recomposition thus giving their faces a somewhat disturbing character. Consisting of netlike curtains that create a square space, the title Birdcage, as well as the form of the installation itself, refers to the old metaphor of the “golden cage”, in which (married) women are locked into conventional social constraints despite being materially well-provided for.

The wedding itself typically follows firmly established social and cultural codes. It is illusion and reality at the same time and the consummate form of artifice, which, despite our awareness of it, enjoys a broad acceptance that cuts across all milieus and socio­cultural and religious contexts: among other things, it evokes certain desires, illusions, and conceptions of true love, happiness, material security, a status, and an ascribed role in society. If the faНade falls or is disturbed, the consequences are hurt feelings, deep disappointment or even anger.

For the performance Hochzeitsnacht (2010), Dorothea Nold had professional wedding photographs made with her Chinese “husband” and sent them to friends and family along with an invitation to a big wedding party in Basel that she wanted to hold in a bar after her return from China. As a result, the artist received countless congratulations, although some were also irritated or surprised because of the Asian husband and the associated conflicts, caused by allegedly significant cultural differences. It was only at the party, which was fitted out with all of the props of a traditional wedding, including the artist dressed as a bride, that she explained the performance to the guests.

The reaction of the guests, some of whom felt truly betrayed by the deception, revealed just how much the ritual of the wedding is anchored in our thinking as something that, as the most important day in a woman’s life, happens only once in lifetime. The performance questions and exposes not only heteronormative notions of marriage and relationships as well as conventional gender constructions, but also those that imagine partnerships only within their “own” specific cultural and religious affiliations.

Dorothea Nold repeatedly creates irritations in and through her works, which in part lead to intense emotional outbreaks on the part of the “irritated”: whether it’s the disappointed guests at the wedding party performance, the visitors to the installation ent­woder, whom the wall tries to harass, or the furious residents, on the one hand, and the excited potential buyers of the fictive building project, on the other, which the series of building signs mounted in public spaces engendered. While the former used social media to vent their anger about the supposed redevelopment of the Prinzessinnen­gКrten and Mariannen­platz in Berlin-​Kreuzberg and painted political graffiti on the signs—Eat the Rich—​Dorothea Nold’s phone was ringing off the hook with eager investors and potential buyers. The telephone number for the fictive firm Schark Immo was listed on the signs, which directly led to the artist’s cellphone via call forwarding. She was even contacted from Hong Kong. The intense reactions show how volatile the situation is and how contested the few urban areas are that have yet to be developed. The irritation and deception through artistic action and intervention becomes a political moment. It holds a form of empowerment and the potential for change. To understand irritation as a political moment means in a much broader sense that what we see and experience makes us think and stumble, sets our minds in motion to question habitual, conventional views as well as our own position therein: whether it’s regarding the city, living together, (gender)relations, identities, spaces, barriers or apparent dichotomies. Irritation continually inscribes itself in Dorothea Nold’s works, making them partly contradictory and unruly, but in any case lively.