Fragile Landscapes

From a process of collecting and combining artefacts that Markus Heller finds during his explorations in and around Warsaw, the artist creates an installation that reflects his direct experience and the working methods he has already elaborated. Model landscapes and piles of bulky waste that merge together serve as a source of inspiration and starting point. The resulting "landscapes" are further occupied by small-format artworks by three Polish and three German artists, invited by Markus Heller in collaboration with Aleksandra Liput. In preparation for this residency and resulting from previous cooperation projects, Heller asks questions about the individual and the collective: Up to what point is a collective integration of the individual to be considered? Where does the group begin and where does the individual start? The individual never seems subsumable. Analogously, Heller's exhibition project raises questions about the relationship of the artwork to the environment of the exhibition display: When the plinth or the so-called display comes to the fore, what is the art? Or is an installation in which works by other artists are integrated "degraded" to a plinth? "Fragile Landscapes" is a term borrowed from ecology and (self-explanatory) refers to ecosystems that are vulnerable. Here, the term is used ambiguously: on the one hand, it reflects the fragile construction of the expansive installation; on the other hand, consisting of found objects, it alludes to different cycles of decomposition: for example, dead wood from the forest that would have been swallowed by the soil with the help of fungi, or human waste taken from our human waste disposal cycle. Nevertheless, the separation of these cycles is only superficially possible. In the end, humans and nature are inseparably part of the same system.