Meine Heimat ist ein düsteres, wolkenverhangenes Land (My home is a dark and cloud-hung land)

The four-channel film installation 'My home is a dark and cloud-hung land', 2011 is thematically bound to the German concept of ‘Heimat’, or homeland. Julian Rosefeldt’s visually opulent film and video installation focuses on the forest as a central and ambivalent motif, omnipresent in German history, culture and identity. Whereas the vastness of the Wild West alternately symbolises freedom and capture, the density of German forest implies a close and partly frightening rapport with nature by simultaneously suggesting protection and danger.

This work echoes the numerous interpretations of the forest in philosophy and poetry since the Roman era, circling around its connection to German nationality and identity. Through the fictitious figure of a theatre director setting up a ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ performance in the middle of the forest, Rosefeldt creates a surreal collage of mythical creatures, Grimms’ fairy tales, operas, Romantic sentiments and Roman and Nazi history – all taking place simultaneously. The dichotomy between culture and nature is dissolved and a huge theatrum mundi, or theatre of the world, emerges in the light of the forest.

– Natasha Conland, Senior Curator, Global Contemporary Art, 2023

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