Throughout the spring season, Rochechouart Museum’s first-floor galleries feature an exhibition of photographic works drawn from the castle’s collections. The works have been selected for their resonance with the subject of landscape and as a complement to the concurrent solo exhibition by Helen Mirra.

Landscape is interpreted here as a vista encompassed by the eye. It convokes the presence of both a location and a spectator. In this sense, landscape can be envisaged as a mental construct, the fruit of our visual perception and of our mind’s view of the world; in short, a multi-dimensional phenomenon.

Borrowing the exhibition’s title from the Claude Lévi-Strauss book of the same name (published in 1962), Les pensées sauvages (Wild Thoughts) delves into aspects of landscape treated as a terrain of the senses, as a language, opening up a variety of visions, categories and contradictions. Each of the artists included in this survey brings a personal thought to their relationship with landscape. Their approaches, whether documentary, concerned with identity, bodily performance, painted landscape, politics or science fiction, all combine to form a portrait of the complexities and countercurrents of the world we live in.

Landscape is one of the major themes that Rochechouart Museum has explored over the last thirty years, particularly in the field of photography, ranging from Raoul Hausmann’s experiments in new-objectivity to personal mythologies expressed in works by Danh Vo. Les pensées sauvages features over one hundred photos by 19 different artists proposing a meandering and above all discursive pathway through thoughts on landscape.

Works by Jean-Marc Bustamante, Tacita Dean, Julien Discrit, Angus Fairhurst, Hamish Fulton, Raoul Hausmann, Sarah Anne Johnson, Mike Kelley, Richard Long, Nicolas Moulin, Gabriel Orozco, Gianni Pettena, Sophie Ristelhueber, Thomas Ruff, Mark Ruwedel, Danh Võ, Lois Weinberger, James Welling, Cerith Wyn Evans