Lands End. Landscape as Image and as Space

Shedhalle / Exhibitions / Lands End

Verena Maas “BROWN”, documentary film, D/GB 2008, 28 min, DV, stereo

Lands End. Landscape as Image and as Space
Curators: Anke Hoffmann and Yvonne Volkart
20 March until 16 May 2010
Opening reception: Friday 19 March 2010, 7pm
With a cooking performance by the guerilla gardener and cook Maurice Maggi, Zurich

Artists: Ulu Braun, Eva Castringius, Matthew Fuller/Graham Harwood, Gabriela Gerber/Lukas Bardill, Dirk Haupt, Verena Maas, Achim Mohné, Sebastian Diaz Morales, Emily Richardson, Michaela Schwentner, Christian Vetter, Jana Winderen

In art, the most melancholic landscapes were created at a time when the natural of nature was surmised as something irretrievably lost, something endangered by industrialisation. Once more, one tried to halt the ravages of time and evoke an idyll that had never existed the way it was depicted. Those were the times of romanticism. What is the significance of landscape in art nowadays, 200 years later, in the year of biodiversity and hybrid artistic practices? What will happen if the social, economic, and cultural transformation processes in the terrain of landscape become topics of art? What if nature and technology no longer will be perceived as irreconcilable opposites but as mutually depending on each other?

The exhibition “Lands End” investigates the images and imaginations determining how landscape is being viewed today. It presents new ideas and alternative drafts. It presumes that melancholy, nostalgia, and attraction, today, still play an important role and act as moments of standstill and criticism since today’s art, in general, is inclined to use strategies of description and irritation, exaggeration and opposition. In times when knowledge about how landscape is being construed has become widespread und has led to a more precise approach to the subject it is extremely important to introduce different lines of thought. They have to take into consideration the dual meaning of landscape, real living space on the one hand and the ideal on the other. The artists we invited did this in their very own special ways, making obvious that we need images to view things in a different manner.