Exhibition at Kunstverein Kohlenhof for the Projection onto the Imperial Castle by Holger Felten and Rose Pistola, "hdgdl", 26 April to 24 May 2025
What remains when everything is filtered through irony?
The artists’ projection onto the Imperial Castle is accompanied by an exhibition at Kunstverein Kohlenhof. While the projection presents its theme in a pointed, time-bound large-scale format, the exhibition offers space to reflect on and deepen it.
At the heart of the 2025 exhibition was the theme of Die Blaue Nacht | The Blue Night: Love and Peace—not as a nostalgic cliché, but as a visual statement situated between pop culture and parody. The exhibition brought together photographs, typographic lyrics, and design experiments developed in the course of creating the projection of the same name for Nuremberg’s Imperial Castle. In doing so, it opened up a space that functioned both as a studio and as a visual quotation machine—held together by a common thread: a love of life.
Between memes and myths, bold colour fields and carefully crafted details, a visual world emerged that laughs, flickers, flirts—and at times unsettles. It drew equally on a shared visual memory and on personal associations, referencing both urban history and the aesthetics of everyday life.
Exaggerated statements met quieter, more poetic nuances. Much like the projection itself, the exhibition consciously moved between contrasting poles: ironic and sincere, trashy and beautiful, digital and emotional.
HDGDL was a fleeting wink, a visual typeset case, an attempt to create small islands of well-being within a complex world. And perhaps—just perhaps—it also offered a rose-tinted glance at the absurd microcosm we all inhabit.
Holger Felten and Rose Pistola
Holger Felten has been Professor of Graphic Design / Visual Communication at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg since 2006 and served as its president from 2017 to 2025.
Rose Pistola, founded in Munich in 2003 by Prof. Holger Felten, is an interdisciplinary design studio with a focus on conceptual communication. Together with a team of ten, the studio realises projects at the intersection of design, culture, art, society, and technology—guided by a clear stance, humour, and dedication.
In 2025, both the projection onto the Imperial Castle and the accompanying exhibition received support for the first time from N-ERGIE Aktiengesellschaft, marking its 25th anniversary.
