EARTH FIRE WATER AIR

Settling Sediment ~ Portrait (2024) is an elevated acrylic water tank containing an outfit of the artist. A pair of the artist’s shoes and a torch are embedded in a thick layer of loose clay particles. Every few days, a pump blows the particles around the limpid water, rendering the objects invisible, until the clay gradually re-sediments and the objects are revealed again. This new production is a direct response to Joseph Beuys’s and Lothar Wolleh’s Das Unterwasserbuch (The Underwater Book, 1972), a (never fully-realised) project where a book was to be displayed underwater, illuminated by a torch. Lahuis fantasised as to how this work could be newly executed. The inspiration arose when he washed his hands after working with clay, producing clouds of clay particles in the water. The display of the artist’s garments is a clear nod to Beuys’s iconic outfits: his fishing vest, felt suit, and fur coat. But this is not to suggest that Lahuis aims to adopt a similar public persona; rather, it points to the artist’s absence. - Laurens Otto. The Four Elements; Reading the cosmos through the elements.

The sediments that flow through the container are made of the same clay as the fragments filling bags and crates surrounding the work. This clay originates from the work Two-stage opening of the Dover Strait and the origin of island Britain, which Lahuis first presented in 2018. On giant clay tablets, the artist imprinted an enlarged version of a 2017 scientific article from Nature Communications describing the long erosion process that cut the United Kingdom from mainland Europe over the course of thousands of years.5 The tablets consist of the same clay as the sea bottom of the Dover Strait. Whenever the work is presented, a constant flow of water runs over the tilted tablets, creating a new erosion that progressively renders the text and figures of the article illegible. Scientific jargon detailing geological processes, as well as landscape and seabed formation, thus suffers actual erosion. This has a clear political significance, as the United Kingdom was then drifting away from mainland Europe due to Brexit, a referendum held just months before the article’s publication. The geological deep time of the article reverberated in the acute timescale of immanent political disintegration. - Laurens Otto. The Four Elements; Reading the cosmos through the elements.

Astromelancholia (2020/24) is an astronomical clock that carries photographic images as dials and was created with the assistance of professional clockmaker Toine Daelmans. The basic idea for this clock was to connect images to astronomical timeframes, making them readable in their ‘original’ state only once every 18.6 years. Its outer ring represents solar time, completing its revolution once per day. The second ring rotates every 23 hours and 57 minutes and reflects sidereal time (the position of zodiac signs). Its third ring corresponds to the lunar calendar and the fourth indicates lunar and solar eclipses. The physical mechanism and the functions of the clock are relegated to the background, so as to foreground the utterly slow disintegration (or reintegration) of the text or image that is displayed on the dial; all the astronomical information that one can find in a regular astronomical clock can be deciphered from this timepiece as well, with the help of a manual. The artist has been creating a growing collection of dials that consist of different images and verses that could be mounted on the mechanism and thus relate to astronomical timeframes. There is a clear disjuncture between the cold brass mechanism of the clock (its back end) and what is displayed on the dial (the front end). Importantly, the piece doesn’t just offer the wonder of a functioning astronomical clock but can actually be used as such. The goal is not to dabble in obscure or esoteric knowledge but to present a functioning machine that executes a poetic idea. - Laurens Otto. The Four Elements; Reading the cosmos through the elements.

On May 1, 1972, following Labour Day demonstrations in West Berlin, Joseph Beuys picked up a broom and, with two of his art school students, swept clean the Karl Marx-Platz. This work would otherwise be done by Gastarbeiter, migrant workers. The hymns, flags, and banners of the demonstration that are captured in the registration of Beuys’s Aktion Ausfegen (Sweeping Up) give off an image of “the left” as a coherent political entity. As a direct response to this piece, Lahuis took to the streets of Brussels during a May 1st demonstration in 2023, 41 years later. The result is Pressing Issues (2024), eight photographs from that day. The most striking difference from Beuys’s Ausfegen on a visual level is the cacophony of elements. The left now seems fractured through a multitude of paraphernalia: the various signs, the lighters and wallets that are on offer, but also the multitude of leaflets point to the disintegration of a movement. Banners are held individually, no longer as a crowd. Lahuis proceeded to coat these images with an emulsion so that they could be burned yet remain somewhat legible. Their semi-disintegration mirrors the factionalising of the left as a political movement. - Laurens Otto. The Four Elements; Reading the cosmos through the elements.

FOUR ELEMENTS - A conversation between Lennart Lahuis and Antje-Britt Mählmann

AM: I asked you to select artworks by Joseph Beuys for the exhibition. One of my favourites is Brennender Gully [Burning Gully], which is a fantastic, beautiful, poetic piece. Could you tell me why you selected this one?

LL: Sometimes I see a work, and it doesn’t matter whether it is from another time or geography, but I just wish that I would have come up with it, which is the case with this performance. He takes a newspaper, folds it, and puts it in a drain in the street. He then lights it, so only a flame reaching above street level is visible. Hiding a newspaper underground and setting it on fire is already a poetic gesture, but the fact that it is an immaterial artwork makes it extra special and feels very close to my practice. Like in my work, he connects current events with transience and, above all, emphasises that the poetic is something immaterial. It is very strong.

Hydrology (2023) consists of four “steam machines” whose water vapour writes nebulous words that appear for less than a second, then evaporate, then appear again, and so forth in an endless loop. The words describe the continuous movement of water on, above, and below the Earth’s surface:

FROM OCEANS TO CLOUDS

TO RAIN TO RIVERS

TO OCEANS TO CLOUDS

TO RAIN TO RIVERS

The complex hydrologic cycles on which most life on Earth depends are summarised here in arguably crude form—just eighteen words, fleeting, ephemeral, almost intangible. The constant hissing and whirring of the steam machines add cadence to the stanza. - Laurens Otto. The Four Elements; Reading the cosmos through the elements.