Peter Land belongs to a generation of artists who, in the 1990s, reimagined the interplay between video, performance, installation, and drawing.

The catalogue for the exhibition at the Vienna Secession documents an early phase of his work, in which his own body, the repetition of everyday actions, and controlled failure form central motifs.

Land’s works oscillate between comedy, melancholy, and self-observation. He frequently stages situations in which simple movements or actions lose their balance. In doing so, the artist does not appear as a confident figure, but as someone who exposes himself: to gravity, to embarrassment, to exhaustion, to the camera’s gaze. It is precisely from this mixture of slapstick and existential uncertainty that his work derives its precision.

The catalogue reveals how Land uses the medium of video not only as a recording of performance but as a space for self-questioning. Physical action, minimal gesture, and temporal repetition become means through which questions of identity, control, and the artistic role are negotiated. The publication thus exemplifies an artistic practice of the 1990s in which subjectivity is not asserted but presented as an unstable construction.

Peter Land, born in 1966 in Aarhus, studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and at Goldsmiths College in London. He works in the fields of video, performance, installation, drawing, and sculpture.