Contested Territories

    “Rolling hills, forests and ocean views form the landscape pictures of classical art, but every day we encounter soundscapes, cityscapes, mental landscapes, mediascapes and ideologies structured by careful (and often forceful) historical scaping. The list goes on. In the widest sense, interpreting sensory stimuli is automatically creating recognisable scapes from abstract ones.

    Artists are always shaping the environment, making new scapes, new vistas and ideas. Scape is related to the Old Norse ‘skapa,’ which means to create, and it has survived in that form in the modern Nordic languages. In ‘Rescaping,’ artists from all over Europe–Iceland, Denmark, Finland, Italy and Cyprus–recreate their surroundings in various ways and examine the multitude of scapes that make up our world.

    ‘Rescaping’ is in part a continuation of ‘Scaping,’ an exhibition that took place in Leipzig last autumn. Every act of scaping requires chipping away, reorganising or adding material to create something new. But what does it mean to re-scape, then? Does one strive for improvement, difference for difference’s sake, or rather philosophic repetition in the Kierkegaardian sense, staying on the path so as not to stray?”