On the occasion of the 16th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale in 2018, together with Georg Vrachliotis, she curated an exhibition on this unique building, placing it in the context of this year’s Biennale theme “Freespace”.
“Sleeping Beauty – Reinventing Frei Otto’s Multihalle” builds on the successful exhibition “Frei Otto – Thinking by Modelling”, which was shown at the ZKM in Karlsruhe from November 2016 to March 2017. The project’s initiators and curators are Sally Below and Georg Vrachliotis, Professor of Architectural Theory and director of saai, who was also responsible for the Frei Otto exhibition as curator. The exhibition architect is Marc Frohn and his office FAR frohn&rojas, also a professor at KIT. The organizer is saai at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT).
The exhibition title refers to the current development process of the Multihalle following a dormant period. The aim is to embed the Multihalle in the social topography of the city, to reformulate the discourse, which until now has focused more on technical aspects of the structure, and to develop a new understanding of the Multihalle as a platform for an “open society”, as Frei Otto intended during its creation.
With her work in Mannheim and on this exhibition, Sally Below builds on her longstanding research topic on experimentation in daily urban life.
