Yvette Kießling, Edgar Leciejewski, Courtesy V/MSP GALLERY
Yvette Kießling, Edgar Leciejewski, Courtesy V/MSP GALLERY
land.scape.travelling.light Now more than ever, borders and bridges are shaping how we live together—and leave us questioning where we stand. Edgar L.‘s ‘w-all’ separates brutally—not just landscapes, but people and realities. We remain stranded on one side. Around us, we find not untouched nature, but the ever-present programmes with which we attempt to master, to order and to understand it and ourselves. By forgoing aestheticised scenery, the artist focuses on the stories of separation and separability— those real and fictional, those blatant and inconspicuous alike. The motifs fill only a part of the image‘s medium, with handwritten background comments noted beneath them—small para-texts as a societal mirror. Colourful lines both enclose and exclude the written words and nails punctuate...
land.scape.travelling.light Now more than ever, borders and bridges are shaping how we live together—and leave us questioning where we stand. Edgar L.‘s ‘w-all’ separates brutally—not just landscapes, but people and realities. We remain stranded on one side. Around us, we find not untouched nature, but the ever-present programmes with which we attempt to master, to order and to understand it and ourselves. By forgoing aestheticised scenery, the artist focuses on the stories of separation and separability— those real and fictional, those blatant and inconspicuous alike. The motifs fill only a part of the image‘s medium, with handwritten background comments noted beneath them—small para-texts as a societal mirror. Colourful lines both enclose and exclude the written words and nails punctuate the girders, making their brittle nature visible. The visual space suggests a topography of control, one that is pierced through by this background humour. The landscape we face here is neither a chaotic primal force not a domesticated emptiness. We witness the transition from the anxieties of Not-Being and restraint to the drive to overcome these. A space for outrage and empathy is created. The emptiness behind the border region is filled with nature—with the lively abundance of the canvas, which contrasts the emptiness of the border and yet continues the mental sphere of the same philosophical foundation. Nature as it is shown to us here is the original force, which escapes, as though in defiance, all human attempts at order and alteration. Yvette Kießling‘s series ‘Mbuzi’* unfolds its very own story and contradicts the shocking emptiness of the border landscapes without losing itself in platitudes. Those looking at these works can sate themselves on the densely superimposed layers of colour—resembling the leafy canopy of the forests of Tanzania in the Usambara Mountains, protected by the tree ferns that serve as silent sentinels on the pathways‘ edges, in the dips and valleys of the forest. Soapbushes—originally imported from Mexico—integrate matter of factly in the landscape. The term ‘mbuzi’, from which the title stems, is Kiswahili for ‘goat’ and begins as an inconspicuous object—as a coconut grater, found ubiquitously along the East African coast. Here, this becomes a border-crossing artefact, a sign that somewhere within this lush nature there are also humans to be found. That which introduces itself so unspectacularly then solidifies into a commentary rooted in day-to-day life, something whose form and history reflect the intersection of culture, colonial importation and imbalances of power. The inconspicuous object thus becomes a quiet witness to colonial movement—it initiates a narrative game between form, designation and cultural history, one that tells of human experience, encounters in situ and the knowledge that nature cannot be tamed. This overlayering of semantic levels (six stones and a sieve in the printing process) solidifies the idea of a space that changes our vision through experience in situ —every layer of colour a fragment of space, time and crossing of borders. *The lithograph series ‘Mbuzi’ was created in 2024 through engagement with the Karl Braun collection (Museen State) and en plein air in the Umbara Mountains of Tanzania. Stefanie Stolle Art historian and project coordinator, specialised in contemporary and collection historyOpening Hours
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