wetness — jeannakolesova

Exhibition view, Landscapes of Unrest: Bodies, Memories, Revolt with Bita Bell, Kandis Friesen, Jeanna Kolesova, Olia Sosnovskaya, curated by Barbara Mahlknecht, Kunstpavillon Innsbruck, 2026 ©WEST. Fotostudio

Hand Embroidery
Reflective Polyester, Muslin, Cotton, Mouline Threads
195 × 140 cm

Supporter by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff Scholarship

Produced at Künstler*innenhaus Büchsenhausen within the framework of the Fellowship Program for Art and Theory

Composed of embroidery on reflective polyester, muslin, and cotton, the large-scale work imagines peatlands as seen from above—an aerial view of saturated wetlands shaped by memory, distance, and embodied recollection. Inspired by landscapes the Kolesova grew up with and can no longer physically access, the work translates marshes, bog pools, and fragmented vegetation into a constellation of reflective surfaces and stitched green forms. The reflective material evokes the mirror-like quality of water in flooded peatlands, while the embroidered “islands” suggest ecosystems suspended between submersion and emergence. Created in parallel to the film In Zombie Fire, Wetness also reflects Kolesova’s process of making: embroidery becomes a meditative and bodily counter-practice to the digitally intensive labour of research, editing, and post-production. If the film excavates wetlands as archives shaped by extraction and violence, the textile offers another mode of relation—slower, tactile, intimate—through which landscape becomes not only a site of analysis, but of embodied remembrance, orientation, and imaginative regeneration.

Barbara Mahlknecht, 2026

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