JUNGLE MEMORY
Andreas Greiner
Andreas Greiner (Aachen, 1979) explores the sculptural quality of biological processes by playing with the limits of form. Since 2018 he has been interested in the forest as an artistic theme and medium. Working with biologists, art historians, programming experts, architects and musicians, he questions the traditional dichotomy between nature and culture. His exhibition at Kahán Art Space explores the possibilities of ecology and technology working together to address the issues of climate change and species extinction. Meanwhile, it seeks to explore new frameworks of understanding in what it calls "the archaeology of the future".
Greiner has an archive of thousands of his own photographs of forest destruction (Goslar, Hambach Forst, Bislowieza forests). He fed these into a deep-learning program to derive algorithmic projections - the "idea" of the forest - from the computer. The result is a reversal of the traditional landscape genre, a kind of "digital hallucination" that explores the Romantic era's notions of sublimity as well as humanity's autonomy in creative production.
The exhibition as a whole is an intertwined story - a multiplicity of economic, historical and technological aspects that can be read as an examination of the postmodern condition: what can art do with the confronting memories of global warming and mass extinction?
Lastly, as part of Greiner's critical self-analysis and exploration of his own ecological footprint, he has planted trees in the venues of his exhibitions: the Augarten in Vienna and here in the courtyard of the house on Nagy Diófa (Great Walnut) Street. The tree - which Greiner calls a "living sculpture" - is given a human name to question the notion of human and non-human and to refer to the man-made separation of cultural artefacts and natural entities.
