Terrestrische Perspektiven

In the organizer's words:

An exhibition on land art, land use and ecology with works from the collections of the Ludwig Forum Aachen and beyond

• 26.05.2024 - 27.04.2025

With Jean-Michel Basquiat, Betty Beaumont, Boyle Family, Lucy Davis (Migrant Ecologies Projects), Danielle Dean, Rackstraw Downes, Paula Erstmann, Mónica Giron, Nancy Graves, Michael Heizer, Irmel Kamp, Barbara & Michael Leisgen, Richard Long, Algirdas Milleris, Wolfgang Nestler, Arjuna Neuman & Denise Ferreira da Silva, Jüri Okas, Ramón Pacheco Salazar, Silke Schatz and Transformella cinis lützerathi

The exhibition Terrestrial Perspectives brings together works that open up a variety of perspectives on the complex interaction between people and their environment. On display is a concentrated selection of around thirty photographs, graphics, paintings, sculptures and video works, as well as some performative formats. Taking the museum's collections and exhibition history as a starting point, artistic working methods from the Land Art of the late 1960s to the present day are presented that share an interest in engaging with the earth's surface: from creative and conceptual treatments to critical perspectives on local and global structures of land use, appropriation of raw materials and exploitation and the resulting consequences of dramatically changing natural spaces.

At the beginning, a showcase provides insights into projects and activities of the Ludwig Forum that have already addressed issues of ecology and sustainability in the past. In 1994, three years after the museum opened in a former umbrella factory, the international group exhibition Arte Amazonas. Klima Global on the occasion of the climate conference in Rio de Janeiro (1992). In 2010, landscape architects Marc Pouzol, Véronique Faucheur and Marc Vatinel (atelier le balto) redesigned the museum's park according to its usage requirements and the cyclical growth of nature. Following on from the history of the museum, this section of the exhibition also presents artistic working methods based on a group of early Land Art works, for which various natural spaces are used and processed as material. The exhibition also focuses on the economically motivated, violent exploitation of natural resources and the ongoing consequences, for example in the Amazon region or in the nearby Rhenish lignite mining area: the video work Sooth Breath / Corpus Infinitum (2020) by filmmaker Arjuna Neuman and theorist Denise Ferreira da Silva, for example, refers to precisely this exploitation of the earth, which has been going on for thousands of years, to call for a rethinking of the relationship between humans and the environment, while artist Mónica Giron's installation Ajuar para un conquistador (1993) is dedicated to the bird species in Patagonia, some of which are already extinct and threatened as a consequence of colonialism. This is juxtaposed with the video work Like Shadows Through Leaves (2021) by the Migrant Ecologies Project founded by Lucy Davis - a homage to the coexistence of people and birds along the former railroad line at the Tanglin Halt residential complex in Singapore, which will be demolished later this year due to the planned redevelopment of the area. In dialog with the complementary perspectives of the invited artists Betty Beaumont, Lucy Davis (Migrant Ecologies Projects), Danielle Dean, Paula Erstmann, Wolfgang Nestler, Arjuna Neumann & Denise Ferreira da Silva, Silke Schatz and Transformella cinis lützerathi, the selected collection holdings of the Ludwig Forum Aachen will be subjected to a kind of terrestrial approach in order to develop alternative concepts of coexistence in interaction.

The title of the exhibition, Terrestrial Perspectives, is borrowed from the "Terrestrial Manifesto" (2017) by French philosopher Bruno Latour (1947-2022), who expanded the geographical term for "terrestrial/earthbound" to include political, social and ecological dimensions. Against this background, the exhibition shows developments in the human relationship to the environment using artistic working methods and asks how terrestrial forms of existence can be ascribed a new relevance for the coexistence of humans, animals and nature. In line with Latour, ways of existence will also be presented that focus on the recognition and preservation of all living beings and organisms on earth as political agents, both locally and globally.

In addition to examining the content of the artistic works and the museum's own exhibition history, workshops and events will be held over the coming months in order to develop alternative spaces for action, including for sustainable museum and exhibition work, together with artists, visitors and the museum team.

Curated by Lisa Oord as the final project of her curatorial traineeship at the Ludwig Forum Aachen.

Terrestrial Perspectives is part of a series of exhibitions with which the Ludwig Forum Aachen has set itself the goal of increasing the focus on the museum's own collections this year. Over the course of the next few months, the museum will gradually fill up with collection presentations in order to re-examine, expand and contextualize its own holdings, taking into account current processes of change. The long-term research project Training the Archive is already underway, for which an AI for collection work has been developed in collaboration with the RWTH, which can be used by visitors and the museum's curators. At the end of last year, the collection presentation of the artist Ulrike Müller opened, which was created on the occasion of her solo exhibition Monument to My Paper Body (since December 2023) in dialog with Director Eva Birkenstock. For the exhibition and research project Fragmente einer Wirklichkeit, die einmal war. Encounters with Ukraine in the Ludwig Collection (since March 2024), curator Galina Dekova is examining works from the former Soviet Union and from Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe that were previously generally inventoried in the collection as "art from the USSR" as part of the research traineeship funded by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Finally, two further presentations of the collection will open on Sunday, June 30, 2024: a comprehensive thematic presentation in the climate wing of the Ludwig Forum Aachen, as well as a restoration laboratory with insights into the genesis and restoration process of the work Earth, Moon, Sun (1990) by Nam June Paik. The exhibitions, which each test different ways of dealing with the works in the museum's own collections, form the starting point for the creation of a new, comprehensive catalog of the Ludwig Forum Aachen's holdings, which is expected to be published at the end of 2025.

The launch of Terrestrial Perspectives will be presented as part of ELEMENTS 2024, a program for which eleven Euro-regional art and cultural institutions have joined forces to celebrate the diversity of contemporary art and the range of renowned institutions in the Euregio Meuse-Rhine together with the public. The ELEMENTS Festival 2024 will take place from Thursday, May 23 to Sunday, June 23, 2024. Participating institutions are the Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht; Bureau Europa, Maastricht; Het Nieuwe Domein, Sittard; Jan van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht; Jester, Genk; Kasteel Wijlre Estate, Wijlre; Ludwig Forum Aachen; Marres, Maastricht; SCHUNCK, Heerlen; Z33 House for Contemporary Art, Design & Architecture, Hasselt and Espace 251 Nord, Liège.