For Commission Roundabout Albrecht Pischel transforms the Goethe Pop Up Minneapolis into a temporary agency for roundabout sculptures. The corporate identity conceived for the occasion blends the appearance of the venue with its surrounding – the mall-like labyrinthine skyway system of Minneapolis.

Commission Roundabout – Pischel’s ongoing edition project – invites artists to produce a sculpture for an imaginary roundabout. This time around Andy Delany (Minneapolis), Katelyn Farstad (Minneapolis), David Flaugher (Detroit), Chris Larson (Minneapolis), and Setareh Shahbazi (Berlin/Tehran) will contribute miniature sculptures that will be on spinning display in the center of accompanying LPs and their players.

Traffic roundabouts as relevant synapses of modern civil infrastructure have recently been highlighted as such by occupations of the ‘yellow vests’ in France during the so called ‘roundabout protests.’ In the United States, roundabouts in their most rudimentary form emerged as early as 1907 and modern versions were built from the 1990s – decades after they became ubiquitous in Europe and other parts of the world, particularly the Middle East. In Minnesota, roundabouts have recently gained ground as a safer, quicker, and more harmonious way for vehicles to pass through intersections. Despite this development and their popularity abroad, they remain highly controversial in the automotive US at large.
Albrecht Pischel takes the seeming banality of the roundabout as a starting point for speculations on underlying cultural dispositions that favor the cross(ing) over the circle.

Previous roundabout commissions include: Christiane Blattmann, FORT, Kathi Hofer, Alexi Kukuljevic, Veit Laurent Kurz, Matt Mullican, Dan Peterman, Paul Sochacki, Raphaela Vogel, Rolf Walz, and B. Wurtz