Sense the landscape

23. September will open Kiasma's collection exhibition Landscape that explores the ways our environment is portrayed in contemporary art. When we think of a landscape, we tend to think of it as a view laid before our eyes. But an important part of the landscape experience also involves other senses: we hear birds singing, sense the breeze on our skin, feel the warmth or the cold. We not only look at the landscape, we live it.

The eighth exhibition of works from Kiasma's collections examines the concept of landscape in contemporary art and in the light of art history, as well as more broadly as a culturally constructed landscape of the mind. Landscapes still appear in many contemporary works of art: in photos, videos, installations, earth art and environmental art.

Landscape is a way of seeing, structuring and valorising both ourselves and our community. Seeing and depicting a landscape can also have political dimensions, or its representation can be used to explore issues of perception and vision. On the other hand, the viewer can be invited to consider landscapes or circumstances excluded from the picture by framing, such as substandard living conditions or the pollution of nature. The picture of a landscape or scenery can even seem like a nostalgic glimpse of something lost.

Conceptually oriented artists work like scientists, collecting and observing the constituent parts of landscapes. The parts are often displayed as they are, allowing viewers to reconstruct for themselves the whole that the parts refer to. Landscape can be experienced only by joining knowledge and vision.

Marja Sakari