Battlefield

Against the backdrop of a global pandemic and awar in Ukraine, Kunsthalle Osnabrück sets out to explore the question: What’s the current state of our hope and desire for love, identity and belonging? This year’s theme “Romanticism” uses the eponymous art and literature movement as a distorting mirror with which to examine the current state of society. Sweeping across Germany and Europe, hardly any othermovement has managed to shape such a strong collective feeling situated between departure, nostalgia and nationalism through aesthetic means. Set against the backdrop that is the museum’s medieval architecture, the Kunsthalle wants to investigate whether the current sense of global turmoil has inspired a comeback of the visual and linguisticworlds of Romanticism. The exhibition programme of the annual theme includes solo exhibitions by the Forum Democratic Culture and Contemporary Art, Anna Haifisch, Gabriella Hirst, IrèneMélix, Cemile Sahin, Andrzej Steinbach, Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings. Gabriella Hirst is interested in gardening and cultivation as embedded with historic layers of conquest, on the one hand, and care, on the other. Her constantly expanding living and dying archive of plants reveals a complex history, reflected in the breeder’s naming of plant varieties based on historical events. The installation Battlefield, conceived for the courtyard of the Kunsthalle Osnabrück, cites the construction of military drill formations and historical garden designs and focuses on plant cultivars as historical heritage and culture of remembrance. The approximately 200 plant varieties used have been named after famous battles, conquered territories, generals or weapons. Gabriella Hirst (AU) lives and works in Berlin and London. She currently teaches as a visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Art, London. Her work is exhibited internationally, including at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (2021),Goethe Institut, London, CAC Vilnius (2020), or Focal Point Gallery, UK. She has received numerous awards and grants, including most recently the ACMI Ian Potter Moving Image Commission (2020). The exhibition at Kunsthalle Osnabrück will be the artist's first institutional solo show in Germany.