Landscape is not just a physical environment, but a powerful visual language that can express, sustain and reproduce territorial and national identity. It is an important part of how a state and its citizens perceive themselves and how they present themselves to the world. “Since the Neolithic beginning, Power has been raising itself into verticality. From high positions a dominant perspective can be constructed, since from there a large view over the low place is possible.”

Looking at the landscape as a visual form of organizing power, captured in painting, photography, and other media, we observe a gradual and ever-deepening human penetration into it. Vertical Horizon exhibition is based on the notion of land and landscape as a poetic and political agency, alongside its technological perception and exploitation, and the influence of warfare on the land and its visual and artistic representations. Highlighting the shift from the geopolitics of the surface to the political geology of the vertical, it will trace the evolution of landscape as the visual basis of territorial or nation-state identity, through the marking of borders and possessions, to the technologically armed extractivist observation of the earth's depths by both national and transnational agents of power.

The landscape ceases to be solely a surface phenomenon, acquiring a vertical dimension where power and control extend from outer space to deep subterranean horizons still residing on the constitutive procedure of observation. After the Second World War the landscape was observed through the enhanced optics of jet fighters and satellites, night vision devices, human-operated drones, homing and heat-targeted armor, neural network modes of visual perception, and other advanced machinery. The newly developed technology was aimed at increasing the effectiveness of penetrating the natural landscape while pursuing extractivist goals and launching military operations, reflecting an increasingly alienated relationship to the Earth, marked by logic of violence and exploitation.

How can we think planetary in the shadow of war? How to confront the ontological power of the vertical? How to preserve a human dimension of the landscape? Vertical Horizon seeks critical reflections on these themes, inviting explorations of the planetary dimensions of war, migration geographies, military technologies, black earth poetics and new chtonic mythology. Through the fieldwork, artistic reflection and cross-disciplinary approaches, it asks how should we visualize and comprehend the earth's scars, the scars that are shared with a human being.

The exhibition is a collaboration between Lentos, the Kyiv Biennial, and tranzit​.at. Funded by the Federal Ministry for Housing, Art, Culture, Media and Sport, ERSTE Foundation, the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program with funds. from the German Federal Foreign Office (AA) and RIBBON International..