Harry Sachs

Harry Sachs, (*1974) is an artist and co-founder/director of ZK/U (Center for Arts and Urbanistics) He lives and works in Berlin. As a founding member of the artist collective KUNSTrePUBLIK, he has been working as an artist, curator, researcher and activist in the Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum, in Sonsbeek Park 2016, at the Jakarta Biennale 2013 and the 5th Berlin Biennale, for Urbane Künste Ruhr, and further more. In 2012, together with Philip Horst and Matthias Einhoff, he founded ZK/U - Center for Arts and Urbanistics - an interdisciplinary hub for urban research and artistic practice in a former cargo-station in Berlin, Moabit. In 2016, KUNSTrePUBLIK became one of the initiators of 'Haus der Statistik', a huge futuristic housing and workspace project aiming at the integration of refugees, artists and social initiatives in an abandoned administrational building in the centre of Berlin.

Harry Sachs studied Fine Arts at Bauhaus University in Weimar and at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg. Since 1996 he also worked with Franz Hoefner and collaborated on individual projects with Michael Boehler and Markus Lohmann. Social and architectural clichés are addressed in site-specific, large-scale installations, public interventions and videos. His multi-dimensional interest in gray areas and reappropriations has led him to temporary acquisitions of various enterprises such as an international tourist office, a model housing estate, a multipurpose hall, two letterbox companies and two office buildings for artists. He was co-founding AbBA - Alliance of threatened Berlin Studio Houses - as activist group against cultural gentrification of Berlin's artistic infrastructure, as well as ZUsammenKUNFT Berlin eG, as open cooperative for a socially and culturally well balanced city development.

www.kunstrepublik.de

Today artistic ideas can change our urban realm much more then ever before. We need cooperation beyound the usual partners, real involvement in social realities and complex questions, as well as utopian visions, which lead into political actions.