Exhibition Texts 'Botanischer Wahnsinn'

PLANT THINKING IN CONTEMPORARY ART ‘One cannot separate the plant – neither physically nor metaphysically – from the world that accommodates it. It is the most intense, radical, and paradigmatic form of being in the world. To interrogate plants means to understand what it means to be in the world. Plants embody the most direct and elementary connection that life can establish with the world.

The opposite is equally true: the plant is the purest observer when it comes to contemplating the world in its totality. […] We will never be able to understand a plant unless we have understood what the world is.’

Emanuele Coccia, The Life of Plants, 2019 In recent years, artists from all over the world and from extremely diverse backgrounds have shown a remarkable interest in plants and trees. This botanical interest cannot be seen separately from the rapid development in our knowledge of plants that has occurred in recent decades. Scientific research has shown that plants are not inert ‘things’, but intelligent entities that are not only able to see, smell, feel, communicate and hear, but even to orientate themselves and to remember.

Along with this new knowledge about plants, there is also increasing awareness of the crucial role that plants play in the stability of ecosystems, as well as of the alarming loss of species during the current era. To halt climate change and the loss of biodiversity, humanity needs to cast off its ‘plant blindness’ and develop a real interest in and sensitivity for plants.

In Botanischer Wahnsinn, the Kröller-Müller Museum presents a kaleidoscopic selection of works by artists who examine the rich world of plants from different perspectives. The exhibition is divided into five thematic sections: Scientific plants (process and taxonomy), Ethnobotany (plants for human use, mystical plants and witchcraft), Ideological plants (plants in political, postcolonial and ecofeminist discourse), Weeds (good and bad plants), Regeneration and ‘green remediation’ (cleaning polluted land with the help of plants).

The exhibition Botanischer Wahnsinn is the first in a new series in which the Kröller-Müller Museum, purposely located ‘in the midst of nature’ by its founder Helene Kröller-Müller, addresses relevant themes regarding nature and ecology and renews the relationship with its environment.