Already in October 2020, the Israeli multimedia artist Yael Bartana climbed onto the roof of the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden around the shofar, a musical instrument that is only used in Jewish tradition on Yom Kippur, for the performance "Days of Awe" over the park idyll to sound. After the corona-related closure, you can finally get a taste of the ritual tone sequence right at the entrance to the “State and Nature” group show. But first you have to pass the spa garden, where the city causes confusion with Jeppe Hein's capricious water fountains and semi-functional benches. Are these temporary interventions part of the program surrounding the Kunsthalle in the no less representative Lichtentaler Allee, the subway notice in the tree undergrowth or the microphone attached to the Oos,that transfers the river sounds to the museum?
Those who leave this collision of competing external concepts behind will find a wealth of post-colonial interdependencies when strolling through the halls on the first floor, flanked by excursions into the areas of tension between threatened nature and the state's claim to power over the respective territory. As is well known, depending on the economic system, this can have fatal consequences for animals, fauna and flora. The new directors Çağla Ilk and Misal Adnan Yildiz are now trying to find out in their premiere how a state should act in order not to endanger the integrity of ecosystems. The two took the title of the exhibition from the poetic work “Devlet ve Tabiat” (State and Nature) by Ece Ayhan, who did not see the state as a regulatory force.
Rather than an arbitrary source of violence that people have to submit to. In this worldview, nature is assigned the utopian position of lost reason, which is why in the large skylight hall you come across a tree that exudes the aura of a futuristic temple. The Iranian Neda Saeedi created this natural simulacrum out of metal, plexiglass and twigs. The sheets of the herbarium come from the Lichtentaler Allee, for which tree varieties were imported from all over the world in the nineteenth century - an interaction of state and nature, apparently entirely to the taste of the director duo, the "Two Shades of Green" (2021) monumental to below Ceiling grows.
It only seems strange that the arrangement is framed by glass balls in which figures from computer games span the arc to digital game worlds. They are formed from green plastic with the help of a 3D printer, so much "naturalness" has to be there. How this was still celebrated in the nineteenth century is demonstrated by naturalistic landscapes smuggled in from the in-house collection by the Düsseldorf painter Andreas Achenbach. Even a work title like “Nordischer Wildbach” (1852) leaves no doubt that from the perspective of the time, nature represented a danger to people that inevitably led to drama and catastrophes. The vulnerability of this fateful force is, in turn, the subject of Mehtap Baydu, who comes from Berlin by choice, from Turkey.