“Arten und Elemente” is a comprehensive exhibition by Markus Heinsdorff that filled the Kallmann-Museum and the surrounding palace park with nine large-scale installations in 2019. Created specifically for the museum, the works combine artistic aesthetics with the principles of scientific research and address human intervention in natural systems, climate change and species extinction, as well as the exploitation of natural resources and their worldwide trade – nature as a commodity. Installations such as Moor, Windraum, Algenlabor and Salzblock, together with extensive collections of natural found objects, turn the museum into a walk-through landscape of discovery between art, nature and science.

(Catalogue excerpt)

The exhibition comprises several large-scale installations in the Kallmann-Museum itself as well as in the surrounding palace park, developed by Heinsdorff specifically for this exhibition. The exhibition engages with the richness of nature as well as with the complex, often contradictory relationship between humans and nature. Heinsdorff thus addresses human intervention in natural systems, climate change and species extinction, as well as the exploitation of natural resources and global trade. At the same time, he devotes himself to the fascinating diversity of species and elements, as well as to human curiosity about the phenomena of nature and the drive to research and discover that has allowed us to penetrate ever deeper into the secrets of nature.

Markus Heinsdorff (b. 1954) is an artistic border-crosser whose work moves at the intersections of art, architecture, science and technology. As such, he exemplifies a type of artist who not only crosses classical boundaries between genres but also develops his work in cooperation with partners from other fields. Originally trained as a goldsmith, he studied sculpture at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich, Germany. In the 1990s he built kinetic sculptures that made the movements of air tangible, as well as machines that generated natural phenomena such as whirlpools, air rings and currents, presenting them as objects of aesthetic contemplation. Heinsdorff also has an extensive body of built work, which he realised in numerous countries, including China, India, Indonesia, Peru and several European countries.

In the Ismaning exhibition, Heinsdorff now combines artistic aesthetics with the principles of scientific research and technical design. He installs a “Moorsee” in the museum, which allows not only a meditative immersion in the landscape but also raises questions about the relationship between humans and nature, as well as between art and nature. His “Windraum”, in turn, consists of a geometrically designed, walk-in space in the museum, inside which a tornado forms out of artificial fog before collapsing in on itself after a short time. The strict geometry of the construction stands in contrast to the disordered force of the whirlwind. In another room, Heinsdorff sets up an “Algenlabor”, which is simultaneously a scientific breeding station and an aesthetic object, in which two machines cultivate various algae that grow and are harvested over the course of the exhibition.

But Heinsdorff is also a collector who has found and archived countless plant and animal objects in many different countries. The exhibition presents hundreds of these found objects in 26 display cases, on a heavy-duty shelving unit and hanging on the wall: leaves, plants, seeds, wood, tissue structures, bones and many other, often barely identifiable things. In an increasingly disenchanted world, in which science penetrates ever deeper into the secrets of nature and research has long since become detached from lay experience, Heinsdorff uses this installation to celebrate an original human curiosity and a sense of wonder at the diversity of phenomena. In the exhibition, Heinsdorff also engages with the history of raw materials and global trade. In front of the Kallmann-Museum, he has installed a large used shipping container, inside which a massive, brilliant white block stands on a wooden pallet, pressed from around 1,8 tonnes of salt. Other installations in the exhibition deal with insect diversity and insect decline, with endangered native plants, and with raw material extraction.

“Arten und Elemente” is thus conceived as an aesthetic journey of discovery into phenomena and processes of nature that usually remain hidden from most people. Project partners included the filmmaker Alexander Kluge, the Zoologische Staatssammlung München, the Chair of Building Technology and Climate-Responsive Design at TUM, the Bayerische KulturLandStiftung, and the Chair of Restoration Ecology at TUM. 

Rasmus Kleine