Dem Wasser folgen

A new view of the element! Water is indifferent to a high degree. On the one hand it is omnipresent, the origin of all life and thus most closely bound up with existence in all its dimensions. On the other hand it has no fixed form, no specific colour and no smell of its own; it knows countless manifestations and eludes being pinned down to a single meaning and hence to any definitive determination. It stands in relation to its surroundings, it makes up our blue planet and our own bodies, it connects as a trade route and separates as a border, it serves for cleansing or for recreation and is at the same time dangerous, a potential site of disaster. It marks spiritual forces and, in times of neoliberal economic orders, mutates into a fiercely contested commodity. Finally, as a resource, water points to the most urgent social question of the twenty-first century: the climate crisis. At the same time, the particular character of this subject has opened up new perspectives on their own collection for the curators of the Kunsthalle Bielefeld and thus offered points of connection to current global and social debates. The theme of water leads to multi-layered questions concerning culture, nature, politics, the economy, body and mind, making it a highly topical and ubiquitous subject of multifaceted international curatorial, artistic and scholarly projects. The observation that an exceptionally large number of works in the Kunsthalle’s collection take up the element of water as a theme makes clear not only how attractive the subject is for artists with the most diverse formal and narrative approaches. An important impulse for the exhibition and the book, however, came from the US artist Roni Horn and her work “Saying Water” (2012). In it she delivers a monologue about water and makes clear to us that we all mean something different when we speak about water. Her important work thus paved the way for the exhibition Dem Wasser folgen and brought about a new view of the element.

Artists:
Katinka Bock, Carolina Caycedo, Lovis Corinth, Catherina Cramer & Giulietta Ockenfuß, Ludwig Dill, Karl Ellermann, Max Ernst, Lyonel Feininger, Conrad Felixmüller, Hermann Freudenau, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Hella Guth, Franz Hecker, Klara Hobza, Ferdinand Hodler, Ludwig von Hofmann, Roni Horn, Axel Kasseböhmer, Jacques Lipchitz, Henri Manguin, Anton Melbye, Otto Modersohn, Gabriele Münter, Kenneth Noland, Adrian Paci, Enrique Ramírez, Ernst Sagewka, Robert Smithson, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Heinrich Vogeler and many more

Exhibition:
Kunsthalle Bielefeld, 4/6 – 16/10/2022