Reinhard Behrens Quotes

“Behren's work resists easy classification. It is part expedition journal, part museum installation, part allegorical theatre. At the centre of the evolving vision stands a deceptively humble object - a brightly coloured toy submarine, discovered on a North Frisian island in 1974. Since then, this modest vessel has become a recurring avatar in his practice: a symbol of human curiosity, displacement, naivety. It drifts through imagined polar landscapes, burrows into archaeological strata, and even interrupts canonical works of European art history with both humour and quiet poignancy.”
― Christina Jansen, 50 Years of Naboland

“Central to the Naboland concept is the notion of evidence, manufactured artefacts and displays that mimic museum practice, encouraging the viewer to suspend disbelief and enter into a space where the absurd coexists with the archaeological, the nostalgic with the environmental. While often whimsical in tone, Behrens' work carries with it an increasingly urgent ecological message. Naboland. is a meditation on our fragile relationship with the natural world, and the objects we leave behind.”
― Christina Jansen, 50 Years of Naboland