The Use of Landscape

The exhibition The Use of Landscape presents works by ten students from the photography and video class of The National University of Arts Bucharest and the art and photography studio of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. This collaboration started as a workshop with Michael Höpfner and Iosif Király one year ago and is part of a larger project by curator Alexandra Manole that explores the concept of landscape with artists, scientists and architects. The workshop was supposed to take place in nature; instead, nature came to us, in the form of a 120nm virus that has been redefining our direct relationship with the world ever since.

The project began with a simple but expansive thought by Jean-François Lyotard. In his 1989 essay “Can Thought Go On Without a Body?” the philosopher reflects on the relationship between humans and nature and how we can view this in terms of the demise of the sun and thus the end of the earth. Lyotard’s reflections are an expression of a new view of the earth that we have been confronted with since the 1980s: we experience and observe environmental destruction, climate change – but have ultimately forgotten nature as it pertains to human life.

The works in the exhibition pick up on this mood. Pursuing this human-nature relationship as artists, and directly experiencing and observing the earth on which we stand in a profound way, was the real challenge in the year-long process of this workshop. Working through the definitions, concepts and ideologies of nature and the utopias and technologies of modernity, and attempting to detach oneself from them to instead try to experience nature wordlessly within oneself. And to fail in the process, if necessary, due to the times, realities and magnitudes – perhaps it is the troubled state of postmodern humankind rather than our nature that resonates through all the works in the show.

Participating artists Amy Casilda Bartoli, Dominik Buda, Cătălina Cosma, Vlad Dinu, Flora Franke, Elena Kristofor, Denise Lobont, Patric Pavel, Diana Păun, and Nora Severios find deeply personal approaches to the use of landscape in this direct engagement with the experiential realm of nature. “The Use of Landscape” – transformed into an existential question.