Erinnerung an die Menschen
Zwischen zwei Bäumen – Landschaft werden
Anthurium
2025
“The substance we are made of is as old as the universe.” – Sabian Baumann (2014)
The three drawings are from the same series: nature (presque) mort (2025) The exhibition nature (presque) mort consists of a series of colorful drawings against a black background. Borrowing from hidden picture puzzles, comics, and scientific illustrations, a visual program has emerged that shows the world in plural, as an always already multiple simultaneity of worlds. This series of works offers insights into a cosmology that is based on a substantial entanglement. In loving precision, Sabian Baumann develops a visual language for how such a place might look. The artist* himself says:
“Anthurium is the first picture in the series. All the pictures tell the story of how the world and the universe constitute us. Without sun and water, microorganisms and insects, there would be no life on earth. Without plants, there would be no animals. In a very free, playful way, the works revolve around this theme and touch on other topics, each picture in a different way. Anthurium is a metaphor for reproduction and lust. A body made of flowers on whose phallic pistils the seeds will grow. An image of the potential of life and a (still?) unlived lust that is caught up in being alone. We see only the back of a human silhouette looking at distant symbols of sun and water, like a picture puzzle of freely floating signs in the universe.”
The work that gives the series of drawings its title nature (presque) mort (almost dead nature) sketches a horizon of a coming planetary catastrophe, evokes clear references like global warming, extinction, the destruction of habitats and of the foundations for human existence and more-than-human entities. Furthermore, the “almost” can refer to attributes of death as a quality, that all realms of nature accept as given, passive, ahistorical, static, and inalterable. In a dichotomy called into question here, everything “natural” is distinguished from the realm of the “cultural” that intervenes dynamically in the world in a fabricated, historically transformable, and active fashion. This notion of passive material animated by an active spirit reflects juridical-economic programs, forms of government, and humanistic self-conceptions. In such a world, nature neither has an impact, nor intention and rights. When Baumann here refers to nature as “almost dead,” this echoes as “almost without intention” and complicates traditional binary positions by positing a nature-culture where modes of existence that differ from one another are linked to one another in an elementary way.
The artist escapes this binarily structured world by developing drawing after drawing, figure after figure with rigor, a narrative that attests to other forms of being. They are existences that elude an all too rapid ascription. It’s not surprising that many of the drawings do not seem particularly “still.” Over and over, the element of a just ended or begun movement surfaces. nature (presque) mort pulsates, vibrates, delicately breathes, not least also due to the shimmering plasticity of the drawings themselves that as traces of movement attest to the vitality of the hands that created them.
Sabian Baumann works in the media of object art/sculpture, video/film and installation, but above all drawing, and has had exhibitions in Switzerland and abroad. SB has taught at various universities and has initiated and co-organized various transdisciplinary projects with queer and intersectional-feminist content, including the experimental documentary “working on it” in 2008 and most recently the documentary film “Who owns the sky”, 80 min. 2022.
Their connection to the Shedhalle began in the 1990s, when they developed a series of events titled “Erotic, but Indiscreet—Feminism, Art, Pornography” (1996) in collaboration with others. Later, they participated in the group exhibitions “The Color of Friendship” (2000), “Belonging – Longing and Affiliation” (2001), “Critique is not enough” (2002), “Citizen Queer” (2004), “SKYPE MEETINGS – Work to do! Selbstorganisation in prekären Arbeitsbedingungen“ (2008), “Un/Mögliche Gemeinschaft (2009), and recently, their work shown as part of “Protozone17: Stories of Those Left Behind.” Sabian Baumann was also on the board of the Shedhalle from 1999 to 2004.
