Laudation Markus Bollen

Photographing the invisible – which actually sounds like a contradiction, but photographer Markus Bollen has succeeded in doing so in his 2024 exhibition at the VHS. From November 2024 to January 2025, Markus Bollen here exhibited works from the last 30 years.
The artist has applied for the City Cultural Association's Environmental Award 2024 with this exhibition. And the jury has chosen him as the winner because his works inspire us to think deeply about climate change and species extinction. We offer our hearty congratulations!

Photographing the invisible: this approach is once again remarkable as an artistic achievement in a world…
– which is positively flooded with images,
in which nothing is safe from media and virtual reproduction.,
– in which the camera in mobile phones has become an everyday object for engaging with the environment,
– in which the creation and publication of images using apps has become an act of social exchange in competition for many clicks and likes
In this world, Markus Bollen turns the tables with his artistic work, using the medium for quiet, and therefore all the more powerful, messages that only reveal themselves on closer inspection.
Markus Bollen isn't concerned with garish visual effects or cheap tricks. Quite contrary to the spirit of the age, he doesn't seek a quick like. Instead, in his works, the photographer confronts viewers with an extremely subjective view of nature... – in order to reveal a hidden aesthetic – to show the beauty far from the ordinary.

Bollen, known for his panoramic photographs, revealed the spectacular in the small with a microscopic gaze in his exhibition, uncovering the sensation of the hidden, drawing attention to colours, shapes, and patterns – seemingly aiming to inspire viewers with the beauty of nature.
Banal landscape and nature photography, as the impression is at first glance? Grandiose aesthetics, simply beautiful. Perhaps too beautiful?
Yes, because there's more to it! Bollen educates the viewers in his exhibition. He makes it clear what they are seeing, and why they are seeing it! And this step – from looking to uncovering – this step is what makes the exhibition so special.

He depicts a dense, delicate carpet of pollen on the surface of the Cadet Pond. Nature as a creator of art, the aesthetics of the organic! – Yet the object of observation is simultaneously a cry for help from nature. For the viewer sees nothing less than emergency fruiting, Bollen explains in his comments on the image: Due to the deteriorating environmental conditions, trees are producing increased amounts of seeds and pollen. A last – seemingly desperate – attempt to pass on genes.
The work „Blackbrook“ stages the explosive growth of green algae in a lake as a result of eutrophication – viewers are confronted with the aesthetics of the lake's eutrophication.

Bollen pits beauty against the horror of knowledge – if you will. He pulls viewers out of their fleeting comfort zone of artistic enjoyment, only to confront them with the radical consequences of climate change. The explanatory leaflets that contextualise what is seen are part of the concept. And they are an important part.
By giving viewers the key to deciphering the artworks, Bollen makes them complicit. In this way, he enlightens, triggers thought processes, and perhaps inspires action. His images are a clever way into the minds of viewers, far more effective than the mere documentation of environmental disasters, which is aimed at generating short-term outrage.

This is supported by the exhibition of hornet and wasp nests. Bollen shows how fragile yet inventive fauna is. He creates admiration, awe, outlines cycles and ecology, refers to million-year-old natural processes – which could be destroyed by humans in just a few decades. All of this presupposes a detailed and expert engagement by the artist with the object of their contemplation, which Markus Bollen achieves without difficulty.

Because he is not only a photographer, but also a beekeeper and active in the initiative „Blühendes GL“. The initiative recently created a nature garden in front of the exhibition space at the VHS (Adult Education Centre). He counters criticism and accusations in his artworks with his own actions. This makes his messages all the more powerful. With his works, photographer Markus Bollen responds to pressing questions of our time and clearly takes a stance on the question of whether art should also be political.

He cleverly uses the means of photography, reducing its claim to precise documentation to absurdity, which – as mentioned – only enhances the impact of the images.
This is how the statement of an artist colleague can be read, which Bollen quotes in connection with his exhibition: „That which I cannot see is of infinitely greater importance than that which I can see,“ are the words of the American photographer Duane Michels.
Markus Bollen impressively implemented this approach with the exhibition „Invisible“.
It is a quiet, silent dying, a drama hidden away, that is happening out there in nature. And therefore, clever ways are needed to point to the distress and the imperative to act. A claim that Markus Bollen masterfully implements in his works at a high artistic level.
Art and message are skilfully interwoven – therefore, the jury is awarding them the Environment Award 2024.

Author NN, presented by Harald Mohr