FORUM KUNST IM BUNDESTAG | MARIE-ELISABETH-LÜDERS-HAUS | BERLIN, GERMANY
ONE MILLION - EDITION ARTICLE 13 - GERMAN BASIC LAW
Exhibition period: May 22, 2025 to June 21, 2026
INSTALLATION VIEWS
The inviolability of the home is one of many personal freedoms guaranteed by the Basic Law to protect the privacy of citizens and to define clear limits for state action in this area.
Asking Uli Aigner for a contribution on this article stands to reason. The artist has been working with porcelain installations worldwide for many years, learning the rare technique of porcelain throwing. Porcelain has always been the material of kings and emperors. Its history dates back to 7th century China, when Marco Polo was one of the first to bring porcelain to Europe. In European royal families, who were still dining off crockery made of metal or coarse clay ceramics, liked to show off fine crockery from afar, even using shards to cover walls in castles and palaces. It was known as “white gold” – which is roughly equivalent to the value at which porcelain was weighed – and people spent vast sums trying to find out the formula for the base material.
Uli Aigner, who first learnt a craft and then studied art, developed a way of wheel throwing white porcelain by hand (and not casting it, as is the standard in the manufactories) and combined the idea of producing customised vessels with the intention to not just set them into circulation like goods, but also to track their journey through the world. In 2014, she started the aim of shaping one million unique pieces of porcelain tableware on the potter’s wheel. Uli Aigner connects production, sale, exchange and donation in order to find “a trail through the global present” through the project, whose results are spread all over the world vessel by vessel:
Porcelain is a political material, a storage medium: I have shaped around 11,000 vessels on the potter’s wheel to date. Every single one of the porcelain vessels is shown at its location on a digital ONE MILLION world map. (…) My intention is to set the table with the world and invite everyone – freed from fear – to talk to each other – virtually and in analogue form. Since 2014, a worldwide virtual community table has been created, but they all have something physical and necessary in common: a vessel (from my hands to theirs). (U.A.)
The aforesaid table was to become the starting point for her contribution on Article 13 of the Basic Law, because tables are the centre of every home. The type, appearance, material, value and shape of a table can tell us a lot about the people living there: are there very large families, childless couples or one single person; are the children young or the adults old; is the table high or low – so do its users eat sitting upright, as is common in Europe, or on the floor, like in Arab or Asian cultures; is the table old and broken or old and lovingly restored; or is it new and a designer piece or does it come from a furniture store?
Uli Aigner developed the invitation to create a table with her vessels further, turning the initial idea into its opposite in the process:
Since my early youth in the countryside, I have been aware of this group of people who have no home that exists at the same time as me and is growing ever larger worldwide. Triggered by a visit to the city of Vienna, I saw an extremely neglected homeless person lying on the pavement for the first time as a 14-year-old. At the time, I couldn’t understand why we didn’t immediately help the man. My uncle, who I was travelling with at the time, just said, ‘Keep walking, it’s none of your business.’ Since then, I have been very emotionally aware of homeless people around me, with the uneasy feeling that my existence or my refusal to help, perhaps my way of life, is also partly to blame for their way of existence. (U.A.)
Aigner contacted the charities Caritas and Diakonie and learnt of a Caritas flat where sick homeless people can recover for four to eight weeks after being hospitalised. She spoke to some twenty of them and offered to make them their own porcelain vessel.
Porcelain vessels are something high quality, they are functional, durable and dense as stone, suitable not just for middle-class interiors but also for life on the street. A sort of pilgrimage vessel. Porcelain is a storage medium. Homelessness and property, self-perception, beauty, hardship and existence. The terrible and the beautiful are in every human being at the same time. (U.A.)
The result was two identical hand-thrown porcelain services, each consisting of 20 beakers, the shape of which is based on the bell of the German Bundestag, which is used (in extremely rare cases) to call order in the plenary chamber or in the committees if the president or chair no longer manages to get people with their voice – an image that Aigner found fitting for the homeless.
Handover of personalized bell beakers to homeless individuals at the CARITAS medical shelter – September 24, 2024
She donated one of the vessels to the homeless person, the twin vessel will go to the art collection of the German Bundestag, where it can be borrowed by Members of the Bundestag along with a photo of the twin vessel, which is now being used somewhere in Berlin. In the exhibition, Uli Aigner is presenting an installation of twenty unfired porcelain vessels, which will disintegrate over the course of the exhibition due to water on the tabletop. She sees this as a symbolic performance with which she is “highlighting a circumstance that accompanies homelessness, notably being exposed to rain and the physical decay that happens as a result.”
Decomposition process: 13 days (left image) • 64 days (right image
-> EDITION ARTICLE 13 - GERMAN BASIC LAW
When protection is missing, form disintegrates.
Those without a home lose shape,
inner form, dignity, self-image.
Those who remain unhoused lose
stability, orientation, self-worth.
The soul disintegrates like
unfired porcelain in water.
Without protection, a person doesn’t just
lose space – they lose themselves.
Form needs space – without it, it falls apart.
Uli Aigner, Article 13 - German Basic Law
Berlin, May 2025