232¼ (h) x 59 x 94½ in
The work engages with themes of mobility, borders, and control, relocating objects normally associated with speed and regulation into a place of pause and encounter. In the context of the train station—one of Berlin’s key hubs of transit—the sculpture reflects on how we move through cities and how public space is shaped, regulated, and experienced.
Vertical Highways interrupts the flow of everyday travel to make viewers reconsider the systems and materials that organize urban life, highlighting the tensions between movement and standstill, individual perception and collective infrastructure.
Bettina Pousttchi's sculptures often use objects from the urban space, such as barrier grids, street posts, bicycle stands or crash barriers, which she mechanically deforms. Public space and its structures are the focus of her interest, because these objects demarcate public space and regulate movement in it, but often go unnoticed.
Bettina Pousttchi at Central Station Berlin
On 26 April 2023, Bettina Pousttchi will inaugurate a new, six-meter-high sculpture called "Vertical Highways" at Berlin's main railway station, created especially for this location. With this, Deutsche Bahn's cultural series "Station to Station" celebrates the start of a series of artistic interventions at railway stations nationwide. Visible from afar, the sculpture above the stairs at Washingtonplatz will artistically enrich one of the most visited places in Berlin for the next ten years.
Pousttchi detaches the crash barriers from their original function on roads and lets them grow upwards. The vertical sculpture is reminiscent of a striding figure with a strong dynamic, which confidently enters into a dialogue with the surroundings and the viewers through size and colour.
The individual guard rails remain recognisable even in their altered form and give an idea of the forces that have acted on them. The anthropomorphic features and the monochrome colouring join the individual parts into a coherent new form. The vertical orientation of the normally horizontal guardrails changes the usual spatial order and gives the sculptures an architectural reference.
Bettina Pousttchi's sculptures often use objects from the urban space, such as barrier grids, street posts, bicycle stands or crash barriers, which she mechanically deforms. Public space and its structures are the focus of her interest, because these objects demarcate public space and regulate movement in it, but often go unnoticed.