Soon a group of wild horses will be running in Almindingen, the heart of Bornholm. They will join a herd of bisons and a growing need for wild nature in a country that for thousands of years has been shaped from intensive farming. The prospect is subject for debate among the locals; some don’t like the idea of new fences, others are worried about their regular horseback riding excursions, and can one really trust that the free horses know how to keep the landscape nice and clean?

Wild horses are often seen as a positive element though, the word freedom kind of emanates from images, recorded with drones and helicopters for popular wild life television programs, showing herds, galloping across the steppes. Still, it hasn’t always easy to be a horse on human territories.

On the Westamerican prairie the European settlers were for many years thinking of the wild horses as enemies to kill in order to protect their farmed land. Not until 1971 a restrictive law, the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act was passed in the US – a program that made it illegal to kill the horses, that by then were described as “(the) living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West”. Still today the states are committed to protect, stimulate (and control) the horses of the prairie; animals descending from the horses brought across the Atlantic sea by the European colonialists back in the days.

But there were horses before colonies. On cave paintings made more than 15000 years ago they figure: brown, black and dotted kinds. Drawings of wild, beautiful, hunted and admired horses painted with pigments along the cave walls that, because of specific chemical conditions, still remain today. Scientists believe that the individuals of the time have been painting with charcoal, grease and earth on the limestone walls and that the rain, seeping through the rock mass, have created a protective layer, conserving the paintings through millenniums.

This is of course speculative science, but after all accuracy isn’t the most important here; the animals, the images are.

For her exhibition at Art Hub, Melanie Kitti has painted horses running alive in a frieze along the walls of the room. From the window outside we see an excerpt – hooves rising above the ground – painted into layers of plaster, sand and lime. In the Renaissance painters refined the technique used in the caves and called it ‘buon fresco’ and in 2022 Kitti makes it her own, painting forth anachronisms. In fragments the motive of the frescoes move from one side of the room to the other. Like a line through time and space. Or like a poem that unfolds as a continuous stanza; from Almindingen on Bornholm to Halmtorvet in Copenhagen to the mountains in the south of France towards the Westamerican steppes.