In Dialogue - Landscape Painting

With Kervin Saint Pere (artist and researcher), Moderation: Tanja-Bianca Schmidt (art historian, art mediator)

What exactly is a landscape? For Expressionist painters, landscapes were characterised by motifs such as the sea, the sun, lakes or primeval forests as a vision of paradise. Originally, the term ‘landscape’ did not refer to nature or a vista, but to a territory shared by people with common rights and customs. The view of landscape as an aesthetic pictorial space originated in Dutch painting. Nature was thus conceived as something distant, framed and admired. In Expressionism, however, space is sensed, experienced and emotionally charged. A passionate depiction can be understood as an expression of landscape ideals. Is Expressionist landscape painting a return to the original meaning of the term, or does it represent the most radical reversal of this concept? Perhaps its appeal lies precisely in the tension between the two.

Kervin Saint Pere Huarcaya is a Peruvian artist and researcher of Indigenous heritage. He currently lives in Berlin and works as an art and research associate at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig (Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig). His artistic practice and research focuses on decolonial theories and visual practices, with a particular interest in archival materials, ethnological museum spaces and colonial traces in the urban environment. Building on Aby Warburg’s visual studies, Huarcaya reinterprets Warburg’s concept of an ‘afterlife’ through a decolonial perspective.

Tanja-Bianca Schmidt studied art history in a global context. Her areas of focus are critiques of power, Black identity and postcolonial theory. As a freelance political educator, she advises various museums in Germany on diversification and decolonisation strategies. Schmidt regularly organises workshops on discrimination-sensitive approaches in art history. She is currently doing her PhD in the DFG-funded research project “Image Protests on Social Media” at the TU Dresden (Dresden University of Technology).

Participation in public events is included with museum admission. No advance registration is required. Meeting point: ticket counter in the foyer.