program for art in public spaces, which was installed in June, 2003, under the title Wo?-Ou?-Where? on an arched wall of the city railroad station Sternschanze. The title focuses the free-floating placelessness of this specific map which induces the viewers to create imaginary localizations. Sabine Mohr has converted it from a small-format depiction into a large ensemble of ceramic tiles, fitting it into the already existing arch of the station wall, which enframes the familiar/exotic landscape rendered in indigo painting. While the train rushes towards its scheduled goals on the adjacent overpass, in the face of the pictorial juxtaposition of "DŽsert," "Montagne,""Pleine," or "Ville" (the map also registers a "city," but it is also a nameless, virtual entity within the nowhere region of the landscape) a journey in the mind is triggered, which may lead anywhere Ð to any shore, onto every mountain top, into any city that is anchored in the imagination of the passersby. The artist achieves a further extension of the picture from the public to the private space and back again through an integrated Web address under which thoughts, texts, and images relating to the different topographical phenomena are collected.

A similarly abstract and at the same time implicitly poetic mapping of a place-without-a-place is the basis of the work How to climb the mountains (2004), which Sabine Mohr realized for the Imagine Gallery in Beijing. Again the source motif is a French map from the 19th century on which in this case the famous mountains and mountain ranges of the world are condensed into a fantasy panorama. The landscape ranging from the comparatively low, smoke-spewing Vesuvius up to Mount Everest soaring up to the sky is supplied Ð apart form the names and heights of the depicted mountains Ð with a comparison diagram of prominent architectural monuments (the Great Pyramid of Cheops in Egypt, Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Cologne Cathedral, the Washington Monument, and others). 

As a further element, the map gives information on the heights achieved by the early protagonists of flight with various types of aircraft. The sublime greatness of nature in form of the mountains is countered by the human achievements in the area of building and (flying) technology Ð the late Romantic "alpine myth"(1) is countered by the "myth of progress" of beginning modernism.

This constitutes the prefigured backdrop to Sabine MohrÕs intercultural, transtemporal intertwining of images, stylistic methods, and meanings. For artistically rendering the map, she drew upon the traditional cutout technique that is firmly rooted in Chinese folk art. The artist in turn sketched the enchanted, fairy-tale conglomerate of mountains and buildings represented on the historical map with a knife into semitransparent plastic foil, which extended from the ceiling to the floor of the gallery as an enormous, almost immaterial scroll painting. The delicate mountain landscape permeated the space like a giant veil. On a pictorial level, by way of the contextual shift of the map, associations to Chinese tradition and present-day culture were activated. Through the graduated mountain reliefs and the buildings in the pictorial representation the mega-cities, which in China are currently springing up with breathtaking speed, as well as the natural appearance of the local mountain ranges were evoked, which over centuries have been a central motif in Chinese painting. The artistÕs installation took the viewers on an adventurous journey proceeding on many interlacing paths.

The installation Camouflage (2002) at the Hamburg Artagents Gallery was applied directly on the wall. Here Sabine Mohr, in the course of a multi-part group project together with the artists Juro Grau (Berlin) and Sylvie RŽno (Marseille), had transposed the already mentioned pattern found on a Russian cigarette pack