NEUSS.- Langen Foundation announced a major installation by German artist Fabian Knecht. For Lachen ist verdächtig (Laughing Is Suspicious), the artist drapes the Langen Foundation building with 60 camouflage nets woven from clothing and everyday textiles by Ukrainian civilians. The work transports a material texture of war and resistance to Neuss.
Lachen ist verdächtig (2022–ongoing) brings a largely unseen form of Ukrainian civilian resistance to the Langen Foundation. Since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, hand-knotted camouflage nets have become one of the most widespread expressions of civilian resistance in Ukraine. Found across the country—in cities and villages, at checkpoints, bridges, and sites of critical infrastructure—these nets shape everyday life nationwide. Although rarely shown in international media, precisely because they serve to conceal critical infrastructure, their presence is deeply familiar to people throughout Ukraine.
The nets are predominantly produced by women and children who gather in communal settings, hoping to contribute to protection against Russian violence. Often woven from brightly colored donated clothing rather than tactical materials, the resulting camouflage is improvised and heterogeneous. While their military effectiveness may be limited, their symbolic and social significance is undeniable.
Knecht collected the nets during 19 humanitarian missions to Ukraine since the start of the war, exchanging them on site for professional military-grade camouflage. Sourced from nearly all regions of the country, the nets vary widely in color, density, pattern, structure, and materiality. Installed together, they form a dense spatial and visual field that speaks to care, vulnerability, resilience, and the blurred boundary between civilian life and warfare.
By relocating these functional objects into an artistic context, Lachen ist verdächtig raises questions of visibility and invisibility, effectiveness and belief, participation and power. The work foregrounds acts of quiet, collective resistance—the often invisible labor of ordinary citizens in wartime—and transforms utilitarian textiles into monuments of collective determination. Each net bears the traces of the hands that made it and the community it sought to protect. The installation challenges audiences outside Ukraine to confront a reality that often remains hidden and to reconsider the forms resistance can take in times of war.
Until recently, Knecht presented these nets on museum walls, both indoors, such as at the Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg, and outdoors, including at the MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art in Kraków and in front of the glass façade of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin during the Festival of Future Nows.
During the Cold War, the missile station on the site of what is now the Langen Foundation was itself covered with camouflage nets—a historical resonance that deepens the significance of Knecht’s installation. Developed specifically for the Langen Foundation, the work does not conceal Tadao Ando’s museum building, as it did at Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie, but instead enters into a layered spatial dialogue with it, partially covering sections of the glass façade, glass roof, and inner concrete cube. The installation unfolds both inside and outside the building and can be viewed from the interior as well as from the surrounding exterior space.
Referencing natural environments—seasons, vegetation, and organic structures—the nets stand in direct contrast to the exposed concrete and precise geometry of Ando’s architecture. The presentation also includes a photograph of an earlier installation by Knecht from 2017 (created in Ukraine): a colorful meadow enclosed within a white cube, where organic structures again confront clear, human-made form.
The presentation is complemented by Land (2022), a sound work by Ukrainian artist Ihor Okunev, previously shown at Haus der Kunst in Munich and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. The twenty-minute soundscape explores the acoustic dimension of a landscape shaped by war.
Fabian Knecht (born 1980, Magdeburg) studied at the Universität der Künste Berlin and the California Institute of the Arts. In 2014, he completed his master’s degree with Olafur Eliasson at the Institut für Raumexperimente, where he studied from 2009 to 2014. In 2012, he assisted in the studio of Matthew Barney in New York. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the MSU Museum of Contemporary Art (Zagreb), the Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, the Neue Nationalgalerie and Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin), the Imperial War Museum (London), and the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden.
