Seeing history?

“A picture is more than a product of perception.” Hans Belting

Who hasn’t felt the desire to be in the presence of things past? To go on a journey through time in order to be able to see a gone by present through one’s own eyes? But history is distinguished by the fact that it is no longer something present but has become something “absent”, as the French historian Michel de Certeau once put it. What is absent evades retinal perception per se. This means that history is always a construction in the present, because only from a respective present does what “has happened”, “has been”, become something “recognisable”. [...]

Moussa Kone approaches the theme in the form of a large wall installation. According to the lower-case title, in its pictorial presentation magic tree takes up the pattern of the dynastic genealogy. Instead of family related branches, individual small-scale images stand for essential biographical experiences and caesuras that in a certain way represent pictorial “biographemes”: the veil, the hunt, the sword for virtue, the portrayal of vanitas.

There are repeated references to images from art history. Thus as already mentioned several times in the works outlined above, here too there are very precise and complex references to historic statements and myth formations on the person of Leopold. Initially, with the title itself, a current reference to the present is created: it refers to the small scented trees for vehicles, which are mass-produced to improve the air and can well also be seen as a synonym for ideologies in historiography. A further important aspect of the wall installation is the relationship between the profane and the sacred in historiography, as well as the relationship between genealogy and individuality. Pictorially, the black-and-white images are to be classified under traditional historiography, while the more colourful paintings stand for the new possibilities of ways of looking at history. [...]

Text by Carl Aigner, quoted from: Carl Aigner, Wolfgang Huber, Karl Holubar (eds.): Leopold–Mensch, Politiker, Landespatron (Lower Austria Museum, St. Pölten, 2013, p.36f)