Mischa Kuball Germany, b. 1959
With missing link_ Edition, Mischa Kuball translates his site-specific memorial project of the same name into a concentrated, object-based form. The mirror work is not merely a formal adaptation; it operates as a precise instrument of perception and remembrance.
The work originates from a void within the urban fabric of Düsseldorf: the former site of the synagogue on Kasernenstraße, destroyed during the November pogroms of 1938. Today, this historically charged location has become almost invisible within the cityscape, overlaid by architectural layers and the routines of everyday life. Kuball understands this invisibility not as absence, but as a latent field of tension—a “missing link” that calls for renewed attention.
The reflective surface of the edition intervenes exactly at this point. It does not simply mirror its surroundings; it actively implicates the viewer within the work. Perception becomes an act: one’s own image merges with the environment while simultaneously pointing to what is no longer there. Past and present overlap in a fragile, continuously shifting visual field.
As in the public installation, Kuball employs a strategy of displacement. Visibility and invisibility, memory and presence, materiality and immateriality are brought into an open relationship. The mirror thus becomes a carrier of an expanded notion of the image—not as representation, but as a space of resonance.
missing link_ Edition is therefore not only an autonomous artwork, but part of a larger conceptual framework. It sustains the memory of an erased site by depicting it and by reactivating it—again and again—within the viewer’s perception.