Exhibition ‘The Glenkeen Variations: Aftergrowth’
Open Space
Crespo Haus
Weißfrauenstraße 1-3
60311 Frankfurt
Free entry
‘Gardening is a commitment to the future,’ wrote Derek Jarman when he was cultivating his shingle plot at Dungeness; ‘blind like any act of faith’. Glenkeen Garden — ‘beautiful valley’ in Irish — grew out of a similar future-oriented commitment. For over twenty years, photographer and Crespo Foundation founder Ulrike Crespo (1950–2019) worked a stretch of waterlogged farmland overlooking Roaringwater Bay on Ireland's southwest coast, turning it into a vast landscaped garden; half cultivated, half kept wild. Her wish was for it to remain, after her passing, a place of contemplation, creative experimentation and communing. Since 2021, Glenkeen Garden has brought together artists, writers, musicians, gardeners and thinkers who immerse themselves in it and continue to care for it. Not merely a gesture towards conservation, but one that points toward future encounters, new relations and forms of being together that have not yet taken shape.
The artist-in-residence programme that grew from this wish is as much a structure for finding one’s bearings as it is for creation. Under the theme of ArtNature/NatureArt, it explores the way in which art and nature — or humankind and nature — mutually configure each other in the Anthropocene era, and what fresh perspectives might be drawn from Europe’s often-overlooked rural contours. Working in groups and collectives, all the artists presented here spent up to three months in the garden, in autumn or in spring, between 2024 and 2025. Over time, the garden ceases to resemble a fixed, picture-perfect image and reveals itself as a field of relationships in constant motion: tides swallowing the shoreline and then releasing it, branches bending and hardening in the Atlantic wind, fruit ripening and rotting where it falls.
The works assembled in the exhibition grew out of this kind of time. Scent, mosses and fixed cycles. Immersion, mimicry and radioactive fear. Holiday homes, botháin dóibe (mud huts) and houses made of wind. Echoing and remixing the frequencies of the region through music and dance, video and computer-generated imagery, drawings and paintings, they form a constellation of Glenkeen variations.
Exhibition Opening
Thursday, 15 October 2026
The exhibition will be closed on the following days
Friday, 13 November to Monday, 16 November
Friday, 20 November
Thursday, 26 November: open until 6 pm only
Saturday, 28 November
Monday, 21 December to Sunday, 3 January
