Art installation by Franz John
Das Gassenfester - The Alley Window
18.7.2026
“For me, you were, along with much else, also like a window through which I could see the streets. I could not do that by myself, for tall though …,” writes Franz Kafka to his school friend Oskar Pollak shortly after their school-leaving exams.
In another letter to Pollak it is stated: “They are all connected to each other,” – the people are meant – “by ropes, and it is already evil when the ropes loosen around one, and one sinks a little lower than the others into the empty space, and ghastly when the ropes tear and you fall.“
The alley window as a medium for viewing and insight – and the rope, depending on the context, as a bridge over the abyss, a social bond, or a shackle. The Berlin artist Franz John engages with these motifs in Kafka’s work through his piece Das Gassenfenster (The Alley Window) by stretching light wires across the windows of the Goethe-Institute in Prague, illuminating multiple layers of meaning.
Text: Jan Brandt
Photos by Erik-Jan Ouwerkerk
The project title is based on a short prose piece by Franz Kafka, Das Gassenfenster, written around 1910.
Light installation for the 2024 Kafka100 celebrations at the Goethe-Institute Prague, ČR, Oct. 10, 2024 – Nov. 6, 2024.
The final image with the ice-blue light was taken at the Goethe Library, situated in a small alley 'Na Struze' behind the institute. The light installation itself was placed there near the large bookshelves housing the Kafka collection.
Franz John (*1960) has been involved with new and old media at the interface between human and machine perception and visualization in association with natural phenomena. His work combines intensive research and scientific analysis with vivid and often tangible and usable installations in public art. In his site-specific art projects the Berlin artist deals with the historical, geological and climatic peculiarities of a region.
He has realized various projects in public art, and has been represented at numerous international individual and group exhibitions, including: in the Exploratorium San Francisco (US), in the Goethe Institute Warsaw (PL), twice at the São Paulo Biennale (BR), at the Skulptur-Biennale Münsterland, at the Ecomedia in the Edith-Russ-Haus in Oldenburg and at Über Lebenskunst in the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (DE). In 2011 he received project funding from the German Federal Cultural Foundation for his artistic scientific work with dye-sensitized solar cells.
The artist, who has been living and working in Berlin since 1980, was guest lecturer at the University of Michigan, the Ohio State University, and the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg. In addition, he has been awarded various scholarships: In 1996 he was Artist in Residence in the Headlands Center for the Arts in San Francisco; in 2007 and 2014 he was a scholar of the Künstlerdorf Schöppingen Foundation, and in 2019 he received the residential scholarship of the ZF Art Foundation in Friedrichshafen.
Website: www.f-john.de