Heike Gallmeier talks to Berlin curator Alexia Timmermans about the travel project “Outlines”. In a van converted into a mobile living studio, Heike Gallmeier travelled along Germany’s external borders through Czechia, Poland, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Switzerland and Austria in 2020/21. The starting point of the journey was the small Bavarian town of Hohenberg, where the artist grew up just a few steps from the then still closed border with the former Czechoslovakia. The exhibition “unterwegs” (on our way)” shows the results of this journey: photos of temporary installations, a photographic travelogue, and interviews on the theme of “borders” with people the artist met along the border.

Heike Gallmeier (born 1972, Berlin) studied painting (Academy of Fine Arts Mainz) and sculpture (Weißensee Academy of Art Berlin). She was a scholarship holder at the German Study Centre in Venice and received funding from the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, the Stiftung Kunstfonds and the Kunststiftung NRW, among others. She has been a professor of painting at Pforzheim University since 2021. Her works have been exhibited at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, the KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin, the Ca Rezzonico Museum in Venice and the Wallraf Richartz Museum in Cologne, among others.

Alexia Timmermans (born 1990, Antwerp) is a curator and communications manager based in Berlin. She has worked at Studio Julius von Bismarck, neugerriemschneider, Kewenig, the Boros Collection, and most recently at Berlin Art Week. She has been pursuing her curatorial practice since 2016 and, since 2023, has been managing Substrat—Artist Management and Communications, an agency providing project-based support for artists. She studied art business (Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London), European studies (HU/FU Berlin) and German/Spanish (University of Antwerp and Complutense Madrid).