During his PICA residency, Jacob Kotzee will develop a new body of paintings that examine the relationship between aesthetics, nationalism and the politics of myth. 

His research will centre on the cinematic work of German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. Her technical innovations in cinematography were mobilised by the National Socialist regime, embedding her visual language within fascist propaganda. Riefenstahl’s construction of the ‘national body’—built around ideals of hygiene, wellness and athletic perfection—reveal how aestheticised notions of purity became inseparable from exclusionary violence. 

Kotzee’s research will trace how Riefenstahl’s romanticised landscapes, folkloric narratives and forest imagery draw on longer histories of German Romantic nationalism. The project asks how landscape, the body and national identity are conflated through image-making practices, revealing the visual and ideological continuities between nineteenth-century Romantic traditions and twentieth-century fascist aesthetics.