‘The exhibition grows out of an irritation that seems to shadow my life or that time and again interrupts my thinking, with something that is actually quite alien to me, and that thing is war.’ (Ariane Mueller)

Ariane Mueller’s preoccupation with war, which is at the heart of the exhibition Fish are folded into the sea just as the sea is folded into fish, has a long and complex history. Decades ago, in the early 1990s, she came into contact with the conflict in Yugoslavia through her work on the art magazine Artfan (1991–1996), which she edited together with the artist Linda Bilda. Slovenian writers wanted to place articles in Artfan in which they called for arms supplies to their country in support of its war with Serbia. Unsure how to handle the situation, the artists travelled to Zagreb shortly after the war began. As a delegate to the United Nations for many years, Mueller was later also faced with the Iraq War.

The preparations for the show 7, rue des Grands Augustins (2023) at Schiefe Zähne in Berlin, which served as the intellectual basis for the exhibition at the Secession, coincided with the outbreak of the Ukraine War. The artist was staying in Paris at the time, where she spent a lot of time outside the studio on the Rue des Grands Augustins that Picasso had rented especially for the purpose of realizing his ambitious work Guernica (1937). The painting in an unusually expansive format was his response to the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939); to Mueller, it represents the artist’s personal resolve to take a stand in his work against war, as well as for what has since often been described as the futility of such an effort.

Fish are folded into the sea just as the sea is folded into fish is divided into two spheres facing each other that Mueller associates with war and peace, respectively. In the former, she presents new large-format depictions of natural sceneries. The artist sketched them around Vienna and in Styria or took inspiration from pictures by the Chinese painter Shi-Tao. They show various paths that lead out into the countryside – wrong paths, as the artist notes. The pictures illustrate the propensity to respond to the confrontation with war by withdrawing from the centre into seclusion, into silence. Or, in an extended sense, by avoiding the engagement with contemporary contradictions and political questions and grappling with timeless questions specific to painting instead. The artist fundamentally questions the possibility of such a withdrawal. War is folded into us like we are folded into war.

To make the landscapes, Mueller taught herself the graphical brushwork of Paul Cézanne, who, when he was the same age as she is now, worked in an isolation he himself deplored. The artist describes it as learning a new language – a language from the heyday of painting on the verge of abstraction – which she subsequently tries to speak. To increase the distance between the work and her own person, she used a six-foot-long brush handle, a device that implies a certain loss of control and experimentation with her own reach and range in composition and painterly execution.

The pictures – Mueller thinks of them as drawings – are sketches rather than fully realized, with deliberate blanks, yet as the beholder approaches the works, they reveal themselves to be dense with scumbled layers of paint disintegrating into abstract colour fields and exposed sections of pencil sketch. A computer animation of haphazard ink stains from 2019 is projected onto the pictures; bobbing and throbbing, they add a nervous energy that disrupts any contemplative immersion in the painting.

In contrast with the speechlessness and isolation of the natural scenes, the ‘peace’ section presents videos that tell stories of collaborative action that is manifestly not purpose-driven. Created between 1987 and 2019 for various exhibitions, they are projected on room dividers arranged to form a labyrinth. Among the motifs are runnels of water trickling down a train window, a tennis match in a deserted schoolyard, the mascot of the Edo-Tokyo Museum released into the street while the museum was closed, the events on the 1st of May in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Or an alternative newscast of the station Lokal TV. Established by Mueller on occasion of the exhibition VideoKanal, it was produced by artists from Vienna and Berlin for three days during the run-up to the 1995 Austrian national elections and simultaneously screened at more than ten venues in Vienna. One of her contributions shows the solar eclipse on the afternoon of the day of the broadcast. 

Many of the videos are informed by the spirit of Berlin in the 1990s, when the artist moved to the German capital to organize collaborative spaces in the precarious structures of the time. The videos show activities that people can engage in when there is no need for results-oriented work, no urgency, leaving room for experimentation, for active engagement in diverse causes, for free time, for ‘non-work’. When people understand themselves to be a part of a world that is an active part of them in turn. What art can do in a contemporary world in crisis – that is the question that looms in every facet of the exhibition.