Maruša Sagadin. Speak More Truth, Eat More Fruit

Vienna-based artist Maruša Sagadin, known for her quirky sculptural interventions, was asked by the Kunsthaus Graz to design a site-specific intervention for the forecourt of the building. The design for a multi-part, expansive sculpture was created as a response to the surroundings and the building. Consisting of granite stones with wooden seats, it offers space and humour and is invitingly painted in bright colours. For the urban space, the project, conceived as temporary, combines sculptural elements that represent markers for the museum and its contents on the one hand, and invite passers-by and people waiting to sit down and engage with the place, on the other. The centre of the work is a sculptural, tubular hanging device with an oversized, yellow-painted pear about one metre high. Speak more truth, eat more fruit quotes a song by rapper Speech Debelle and is both a demand and a reference to the artist’s roots. These combine elements of street art, pop, comic and hip-hop culture. Sagadin’s work delights in breaking established codes, thereby sensitively revealing social mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion in urban space.