BREMEN.- Till Krause explores the ways in which we interact with the surrounding urban and rural landscape, the impact of this interaction, and how new perspectives on these landscapes can be developed. In The practice of everyday life, Michel de Certeau describes the city as a “text” written by its stakeholders, but one they cannot read without taking a step back from it.1 This idea, which regards the structures of the human environment as a text to be deciphered, corresponds exactly to Till Krause’s artistic practice. Our interaction with the urban and natural environment is governed by the way in which we use it for our own ends, and he scrutinises the seemingly everyday and familiar to reveal new ways of reading the urban and rural text. Krause doesn’t describe the manifestations of landscape and space, but the imagination of them, the social parameters that guide our perception of them. He refers to his art as “working on these parameters”. He takes the texts written and rewritten by social, historical and economic realities, makes their subtexts readable, and thus finds new ways of formulating them.

The exhibition Briesener Zootzen at the GAK Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst concentrates on Krause’s multipart work Achse Kiel - Hamburg, and for the first time presents all its different elements together. In Achse Kiel - Hamburg he walked in an exactly straight line from the city centre of Kiel to his house in Hamburg-Altona. On the way, he noted different ways in which civilisation had made its mark on the landscape, and meticulously transferred these into large maps or handwritten records. For example one map shows the extent of mobile phone coverage on the route from Kiel to Hamburg, another maps the possibilities of the unobstructed view and again another lists the public areas along the way. Each of these detailed outcomes uses subjective experience within objectively defined parameters (the straight line and the mapping process) to create an aesthetically highly attractive picture of social realities, which we have never seen in this way before. To say it once again with Certeau: Krause reveals “the strangeness of the everyday”2, giving us a new view of the familiar and helping us to interpret it.

In the GAK the different elements of Achse Kiel - Hamburg are placed in the overall context of Krause’s work, with the artist developing and integrating new works and displays for this occasion. These are based on the one hand on Achse Kiel - Hamburg , but they also take up gestures of empowerment in the public space, such as graffiti, aligning themselves with the tradition of artists’ manifestos, interweaving landscape marking and citing guises of protest culture, or citing beery party tent atmospheres. The result is a collision of different approaches and interpretations of landscape, which sketches a multifaceted picture of human inscriptions on the environment.

The title of the exhibition, Briesener Zootzen , acts not as a specific local reference to the line walked between Kiel and Hamburg, but rather as a kind of place of longing beyond it: in his work on and with maps, Till Krause encounters the name of this settlement to the northwest of Berlin. Without knowing anything about its background, he let his imagination run free about the sound of “Briesener Zootzen” and developed ever more absurd ideas as to what could be behind it. Ideas that have little to do with the reality of the village of 364 souls, as he would learn during a later visit. In his exhibition, the title acts as an image for the power of imagination, which has the same determining influence of our perception of the environment as its factual appearance. It also forms a link to his fundamental work approach, beyond Achse Kiel - Hamburg.

In 1850, Edgar Allan Poe published his story The Island of the Fay. This traces how our perception of a natural phenomenon, in this case an island in the middle of a river, becomes increasingly mysterious as a result of the narrator’s close observation and exact description, until ultimately it resembles a fairytale. The island is transformed by the power of his gaze, and transcends what he sees. Till Krause likes this story very much.3

Till Krause (*1965) lives in Hamburg. He works on his own, with the artists’ project space Galerie für Landschaftskunst and in several cooperations on ideas of urban space, landscape and nature.

Briesener Zootzen is curated by Janneke de Vries and accompanied by an extensive programme of events.


1 University of California Press 1984, p. 93.
2 Ibid., p. 93.
3 See, for example, Till Krause, Karte der Welt nach Poe , 2008, collage on paper, GAK Jahresgabe, edition of 35, €120.