Remembering Landscape

What do we understand by landscape today? Still the aesthetic ideal, inherited from Romanticism, of a variedly composed space of nature, agriculture and settlement? Modern landscapes today are frequently “non-places.” They bear the traces of economic interventions and shifting borders; they are marked by expulsion and war, or by urban sprawl and mining. Often all that remains is a kind of residual nature in which a few ruins bear witness to historical events. Desolate landscapes that speak of past violence have been degraded to (illustrative) material. At the same time, memories (of war) are visibly embodied in architectural monuments of the twentieth century. In this exhibition and in numerous contributions to the comprehensive book, 24 artists and artists’ groups make the topos of landscape speak. They work on images of landscape between fiction, symbol and documentation, and they appeal to our capacity to read and decipher these images – and of course they address our imagination and our ability to feel empathy.

Artists:
Anca Benera und Arnold Estefán, Nico Bleutge, Bogdan Bordeianu, Lucian Bran, Helwig Brunner, Marianna Christofides, Luc Delahaye, Chloe Dewe Mathews, Lukas Einsele, Daniel Falb, Cyprien Gaillard, Dani Gherca, Anne Heinlein und Göran Gnaudschun, Nico Ilfoveanu, Markus Karstieß, Thomas Kellner, Jan Kempenaers, Anselm Kiefer, Aglaia Konrad, Susanne Kriemann, Armin Linke in collaboration with Aristide Antonas and Estelle Blaschke, Richard Mosse, Andreas Mühe, multiplicity, Cyprian Muresan, Paul Nash, Alexandra Navratil, Cristian Rusu, Larisa Sitar, Milica Tomic & Sans Souci Collective, Unknown Fields, Danny Veys, Paul Virilio, Kristof Vrancken

Exhibitions:
Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen, 10/6 – 30/9/2018
MNAC Muzeul National de Arta Contemporana, Bucharest, 16/11/2018 – 17/3/2019
Sint-Lukasgalerie and De Markten, Brussels, 24/4 – 8/6/2019