Gideon Kiefer draws, paints, scribbles and writes as if memory were already eroding. Time is running on, if it hasn’t already run out. He knows the urgency, and what he leaves us with are riddles. Repeating the obvious holds no interest. What comes through instead are fragments of thought, scenes, truths that feel less like knowledge than like intuition. Suspicion – of memory, of the given order – is what sets his work in motion. From that doubt comes a kind of authority.

Kim Stanley Robinson once put it this way in New York 2140:
“They put it in bumper sticker terms: massive sea level rise sure to follow our unprecedented release of CO2! They published their papers, and shouted and waved their arms, and a few canny and deeply thoughtful artists made lurid works of such an eventuality, and the rest of civilisation went on torching the planet like a Burning Man pyro masterpiece. Really. That’s how much those knuckleheads cared about their grandchildren, and that’s how much they believed in scientists, even though every time they felt a slight cold coming on they ran to the nearest scientist to seek help.”

That is where Kiefer’s images speak most plainly. They don’t explain. They hang in the air. They follow you. They leave behind a fevered sense that something essential has slipped just beyond view. A rhythmic murmur: Burn, motherfucker, burn. At once curse and prophecy.

Everything points outward – ecologically, politically, inescapably. His works are not accusations and not conclusions. They are statements, quiet but relentless – like a thought whose shadow lingers long after it should have faded. Yet in that lingering shadow, there is also the faint glimmer of resilience: the reminder that what endures, even in fragments, might still guide us toward another beginning.