Icons of the Water Route is an ongoing artistic project by Niels Broszat that brings together painting, text and imagined landscapes. Starting from his series of icons, Broszat explores what an image can become once it is released from its original context and allowed to travel.
The Water Route refers to the maritime Silk Routes that once connected distant cultures, beliefs and ways of thinking. In Broszat’s work, these routes are not treated as history, but as a way of looking – a movement between places, stories and images that resist settling into a single meaning.
Rather than illustrating a journey, Icons of the Water Route constructs one. Paintings appear in unfamiliar settings, narratives intersect, and fragments from different traditions coexist without hierarchy. The work does not seek to explain, but to open space – for confusion, association and renewed attention.
Icons of the Water Route exists as a book, exhibitions and related installations, and continues to unfold across different forms and contexts.