The Zollverein, once a thriving coal mine industrial complex in Essen, North Rhine-Westphalia, saw its operations cease in 1986, when the seams of profit ran dry. Yet, the scars it left on the land endured, etched deep into the soil. To prevent future floods from breaching the region, professionals occasionally have to fill the mine's gaping wounds with concrete—a technical and ecological necessity to hold back the relentless waters.

From the miners’ lexicon, a word emerged to describe the lasting impact of coal mining: Ewigkeitslast. The eternal burden. It evokes the weight of an endless responsibility, an unyielding duty that persists long after the last shaft was sealed. The word carries the heaviness of a promise that cannot be undone, a perpetual obligation that shadows the land, tethering past to future in an unbroken chain. It is as potent as Weltschmerz — a profound, existential melancholy that encapsulates the weight of the world's sorrow.

It was back in 2001, when Zollverein became a UNESCO World Heritage Site, that the large-scale, two-story spiral installation The Palace of Projects by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Soviet-born conceptual artists, found its permanent home in the Salzlager (salt warehouse). The piece houses plans and mock-ups for 61 utopian projects, signed by fictional authors. The wings of the Salzlager were expanded for the purpose, making space for this monumental artwork to take root within the historic industrial landscape. [1]

Fast forward to the third year of the war in Ukraine, the exhibition Landscapes of an Ongoing Past surrounds the semi-translucent structure by the Kabakovs. Curated by a German-Ukranian interdisciplinary team including Alisha Raissa Danscher, Tatiana Kochubinska, Yevheniia Moliar, and Britta Peters, the Artistic Director of Urbane Künste Ruhr, the exhibition offers a nuanced proposition that, rather than oscillating between utopian ideals and subtle dystopian undercurrents, instead gestures toward the burden of time. The showcase predominantly features Ukrainian artists, whose unique perspectives bring depth to this complex narrative full of historical references. Yet while referencing the Soviet era, the exhibition overlooks the perspectives of Russian artists, though many having faced displacement may provide a crucial critical angle on the current escalations. Emerging from a semi-dimmed 1,500-square-metre hall, ten artistic positions and a Cinema Pavilion are positioned as a proscenium to challenge Kabakov’s grand utopian vision. The poetics inherent to the end of the last century in the Palace are tested by two video installations — one by Yuri Yefanov and the other by Uli Golub.

Yefanov's three-screen installation You Will Survive (2024), placed within an artificial allotment garden landscape made of plastic flowers, hosts a film titled We Will Definitely Talk About This After the Last Air Raid Alert Stops (2024). Yefanov draws a parallel between climate and political crises, proposing a speculative solution: a society working in a recultivation program to transform a city into a gigantic forest over time.

Babushka in Space (2017) by Uli Golub, viewable from turbo massage chairs that provide an out-of-body experience, offers a reflection on life on Earth from a space station. This work references Ilya Kabakov’s The Man Who Flew into Space from his Apartment (1985) and related theoretical and philosophical writings.

Other post-Soviet artists, such as Georgian Nino Kvrivishvili, create artworks that deeply engage with the history of Soviet industry. Kvrivishvili’s large-scale, 20-metre-long textile piece, inscribed with the words “Колич. Отр." (which can be roughly translated as “number of cut parts"), is positioned across the entire width of the hall at more than a half its height. This piece serves as another focal point in the exhibition, framing a landscape composed of fragments from the past. These fragments can be divided into three categories: new materialism, speculative fiction, and cosmism, all embedded within a post-industrial context. Each category reflects a kind of over-identification with the past, externalised through objects that carry these historical narratives forward.

Post-socialist industrial ruins, a common denominator among the other included artists’ countries of origin (Albania, Bulgaria, GDR), serve as tangible links to historical ideologies, enabling the audience to grasp poetically the lives, struggles, and achievements of their ancestors. Their artworks remind us of the impermanence of human endeavours and the passage of time, instilling a sense of humility.

The group of artworks addressing the collapse of utopia when faced with harsh reality includes The Popasna Corner (2024) by Nikita Kadan. This art installation features two quite unique cultural examples from the periphery, destroyed along the war-torn city of Popasna in Ukraine. It first references the Biotechnosphere series, a case of cosmism originally created by artist Fyodor Tetyanich, aka Fripulya (1942-2007), a representative of the real underground and hero of aesthetic resistance to Soviet official culture, back from the 1980s. The other featured case of a specific cultural activity is the Semen Ioffe Museum, conceived by local teacher and historian Semen Ioffe, who visualised the history of humankind through various examples from natural history.

This exhibition, distant/removed from the reality of war, can act as a means of bringing utopia a step closer to eternity. On the grounds of the Zollverein Coking Plant, directly in front of the Salzlager (salt warehouse), a reconstruction of the Biotechnosphere is presented by Bogdan Tetianych, son of Fripulya, and Ukrainian architect Bögdana Kosmina. Nearby, a digital restoration effort by the non-profit organisation Pixelated Realities provides a form of heritage protection: a large QR code grants access to a digital representation of the sandbagged statue of Duke de Richelieu in Odessa, a powerful symbol of the need to safeguard culture from the ravages of war.

Through art, ruins symbolise resilience and continuity. Despite the passage of time and their gradual erosion, they endure, offering valuable lessons about adaptation and the ongoing cycles of creation and destruction.

Marta Dyachenko, an architect and artist whose installation about the International Congress Centrum garnered significant attention at Art Cologne last year, is now represented with two installations following the same sober and grounded principle of rearticulating historical traces. The piece inside the Salzlager, Floating Island (2019, 2022), is a fictional landscape that merges two contrasting states: new construction and ruins. Dyachenko’s approach is rooted in real historical references, combining them to not only materialise utopias but also to underscore the roughness and ephemerality of their manifestation in the present time.

In Zhanna Kadyrova's work, widely recognized for her upcycling of tiles from destroyed, modified, and abandoned buildings, the artist transforms materials from the former Ukrainian Darnytsia Factory into a form of clothing. This act of repurposing speaks to new materialism. The selection of Jana Gunstheimer's almost photorealistic graphite drawing Kosmos (2015-2016), which references the GDR era and post-Cold War conditions, oscillates between the themes of new materialism and cosmism. In Driant Zeneli's video installation Maybe the Cosmos Is Not So Extraordinary (2019), which represented Albania at the Venice Biennale that same year, the story of chrome extraction in the Bulqizë mine is retold through poetic means. By focusing on the agency of five young people, Zeneli crafts a utopia within a dystopian landscape.

What we often refer to as “eternity" is, in reality, a contingent concept, especially within our industrialised world, where constant and unexpected change forces us to question the very notion of the eternal. In this context, artworks become reflections or mirrors of what Zeigam Azizov describes “the changing shape of time." [2] The idea is that time, which resists formalisation and schematization due to its perpetual flux, can still leave traces that artists seek to shape. Here, the industrial disruption of time presents itself as a challenge, compelling artists to grapple with the “eternal burden" of trying to formalise what is inherently elusive. 

While there is an unquestionable responsibility to take a stance against the war, supporting Ukrainian artists and curators is a crucial but challenging task, as the present horror often defies articulation. By invoking post-Soviet, post-socialist, and post-industrial references, and projecting a post-natural landscape of an ongoing past, the exhibition Landscapes of an Ongoing Past emphasises that phenomena like Zollverein, Popasna, the Albanian mine, or a Georgian factory carry an eternal burden. Despite their fading condition, these sites symbolise humanity's enduring struggle to maintain them, and the sorrow of an unattainable utopia on the long term.

[1] Two negatives of the extensions, built up for the occasion of the exhibition, host a Cinema Pavillion (showing seven cinematic works), while the other one hosts the video by Driant Zeneli.

[2] Azizov, Zeigam. "The Changing Shape of Time, the Crisis of Exteriorization, the Chronotope." In Avant Garde and Liberation: Contemporary Art and Decolonial Modernism, curated by Christian Kravagna and co-curated by Matthias Michalka. Exhibition catalogue. Vienna: MUMOK, 2024.



LANDSCAPES OF AN ONGOING PAST

at Stiftung Zollverein, Essen
by Urbane Künste Ruhr
16/08 - 22/09/2024

with works by Marta Dyachenko, Zhanna Kadyrova, Nikita Kadan, Uli Golub, Fedir Tetianych, Bögdana Kosmina, Bogdan Tetianych, Jana Gunstheimer, Nino Kvrivishvili, Yuri Yefanov, Driant Zeneli and Ilya and Emilia Kabakov

curated by Alisha Raissa Danscher, Tatiana Kochubinska, Yevheniia Moliar and Britta Peters

Salzlager, UNESCO-Welterbe Zollverein
Heinrich-Imig-Straße 11
45141 Essen