"After Lennart Lahuis’ solo exhibition ‘Earth Fire Water Air’ at Museum Schloss Moyland in Bedburg Hau, a solo booth at Art Düsseldorf, and a duo exhibition at Britta Rettberg Gallery in Munich within the framework of Various Others, Dürst Britt and Mayhew is happy to premiere a selection of his most recent works in The Netherlands.
Central in the exhibition ‘Pockets of Memory’ is a group of crates containing clay fragments, which seem to be randomly inscribed with words and sentences. These fragments however originate from Lahuis’ work ‘Two-stage opening of the Dover Strait and the origin of Island Britain’, which he 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. The tablets consisted of the same clay as the sea bottom of the Dover Strait. Whenever the work was presented, a constant flow of water ran over the tilted tablets, creating a new erosion that progressively rendered the text and figures of the article illegible. Scientific jargon detailing geological processes, as well as landscape and seabed formation, thus suffered actual erosion. This had a clear political significance, as the United Kingdom was then drifting away from mainland Europe due to Brexit. The clay fragments, which also fill the exhibition walls, give the viewer the feeling as if entering an archeological site and of having to put the pieces back together again to make sense of things. However, as a result of combining the fragments in a very free and personal way, Lahuis gives a poetical twist to his scientific source material.
This feeling is enhanced by a series of photographs that Lahuis made during a May 1st gathering in 2023 in Brussels. These burned images were initially presented on the floor of Museum Schloss Moyland, in dialogue with documentation of Joseph Beuys' performance Ausfegen/Sweeping Up. That performance took place on May 1st, 1972, when Beuys took to the streets of Berlin to sweep up the remains of the Labor Day protest held that day. Lahuis’ images, themselves remnants of that same date in 2023, are presented under the title Pressing Issues (2024). Political motifs can be recognized in these photos, but they are always accompanied by objects that evoke the elements. For example, the wind tugs at a balloon bearing the words 'May 1, 2023'; lighters can be found next to various items from 'the European Left'; and a stone inscribed with the word 'peace' is placed on flyers to keep them from blowing away. Lahuis coated these images with an emulsion so that they could be burned yet remain partially legible. In this exhibition, these specific works enter into dialogue with a poster by the artist Jacqueline de Jong (1939–2024), which she designed, printed, and distributed for the 1968 student protests in Paris." - Dürst Britt and Mayhew gallery.
