She thus shifts an image familiar from urban space to a place marked by industrial work, abandoned and seemingly inhospitable, metaphorically speaking: in the engine room of everyday life between sewage plant and steelworks, the bicycles seem mysteriously out of place. Freed from their use, their design emerges all the more clearly. Close to the former mouth of the River Emscher, Emscher Folly also refers to the artificiality of a landscape as strongly shaped by man as the Emscher region.

Nicole Wermers lives and works in London and Emsdetten. She has been a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich since 2017. She was a fellow of the German Academy Villa Massimo in Rome in 2012 and was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2015. In her sculptures, photographs and collages, the artist combines formal questions with investigations of urban space and its social, economic and psychological inscriptions.