Landscapes of Unrest: Bodies, Memories, Revolt

Bita Bell, Kandis Friesen, Jeanna Kolesova und Olia Sosnovskaya

curated by Barbara Mahlknecht

The concluding exhibition of the Büchsenhausen Fellowship Programme for Art and Theory 2025/26 explores forms of resistance and memory amid the contradictions of past and present imperialism, extraction and colonial-capitalist violence. The artists examine how bodies, landscapes and architectural ruins, oral histories and ghostly traces act as witnesses and become sites of unrest and uprising:
Bita Bell’s work engages with solo protest performances in public space through writing and movement, revealing how choreography as a pattern of social behavior can reorganize relations between bodies, spaces and their powers; Kandis Friesen traces the material and ephemeral remains of the former Soviet Gulag Karlag in Karaganda, where architecture, landscape and sound transmit historical memory; Jeanna Kolesova approaches wetlands and marshes as ecological, political and cultural archives of violent destruction and potential resilience; and Olia Sosnovskaya explores the Białowieża Forest as a contested space shaped by imperial decline, partisan resistance and the ongoing refugee crisis. Collectively, the works ask how memory — individual and collective, not least through artistic imagination — might become a force of unrest, uprising and resistance.

Exhibition Booklet

Opening
Thursday, 21.05.2026, 18.30 with the performance If not me, then you? by Bita Bell
Meeting point: Underpass and square next to the Landestheater 
anschließend im Kunstpavillon:
Welcoming: Benjamin Zanon (member of the board)
Introduction: Barbara Mahlknecht

Exhibition dates: 22.05. – 01.08.2026