Screenshot of Google Satellite Map, Kangerlussuaq area, 2021

Rikke Luther: Missing Atmospheric Ice Crystal, 2021

New, unpredictable weather, caused by the climate changes related to human activities, creates new, unpredictable muds. Older more stable habitats are threatened. In 2021 the journal “Nature: Geoscience” published a new study on the effect of climate breakdown on the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. The AMOC is at its weakest for a thousand years, ultimately threatening the Gulf Stream that regulates temperatures in the northern hemisphere. Increased heatwaves in Europe and storms on eastern seaboard of north America will increase mud-flows in some areas, while hardening muds in others, effecting tree cover and vegetation vital to the carbon cycle.

To predict future patterns, scientists collect proxy data gleaned from ancient sedimentary muds and ice-cores in Greenland, as if the past is returning to regain control of an unpredictable future. Nations may be defined by their laws, but ecosystems and muds do not obey laws or boundaries. A new way of thinking is needed.

The unpredictability of The New Mud forms the basis of Rikke Luther’s exhibition project in ANA. The work stems from i.a. of a recent stay in Kangerlussuaq in Greenland and at Narsaq International Research Station. On the basis of a spatial presentation of Luther’s preliminary studies and a number of artistic outputs in the form of e.g. clay and mud as well as other material in process, film screenings and a conversation will be held from 11 December to 17 December. This program follows. A second part of the project will take place in ANA in 2023.

Program:

On Saturday, December 11 at 15-17, Rikke Luther talks about her preliminary research and presents the exhibited material. Subsequently, the film Concrete Nature: The Planetary Sand Bank from 2018 – which explores the changing ideological contexts of concrete buildings – will be shown. The film, which premiered at CPH: DOX in 2019, is part of Luther’s practice-based PhD project Concrete Aesthetics. From Universal Rights to Financial Post-Democracy.

The film will be shown at 15.30 and 16.30 and there will be a limited number of seats. Valid corona passport is required to join the event. We recommend also having a negative covid-19 test.

Wednesday, December 15 at 17-18.30 Rikke Luther’s film Concrete: The Great Transformation from 2020, which gave concrete structures their initial set of references and meanings, will be shown. The film is still in process.

Valid corona passport is required to join the event. We recommend also having a negative covid-19 test.

Friday, December 17 at 17-19. The conversation “Mud Crystals” with Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London, Esther Leslie, is prompted by Rikke Luther’s artistic exploration of materials to examine how mud mingled with ice opens up longer histories of extraction and profit maximization. Esther Leslie’s research has explored liquid crystals, synthetic dyes, animation, mud, ice and milk. This i.a. in the book Liquid Crystals: The Science and Art of a Fluid Form from 2016. In addition to Esther Leslie and Rikke Luther, artist and researcher Lise Autogena as well as artists, teachers and co-founders of Urbonas Studio, Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas will participate in the conversation, that will will draw on discussions from the seminar Transnational Mud: Swamps, Earth, and Transnational Trees, which was held at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in the spring of 2021.

Lise Autogena is the founder of ‘Narsaq International Research Station’, Professor of Cross-Disciplinary Art and Head of Research at Sheffield Hallam University. Urbonas Studio is an interdisciplinary research practice that facilitates exchange amongst diverse nodes of knowledge production and artistic practice in pursuit of projects that transform civic spaces and collective imaginaries. Nomeda Urbonas is a Research Affiliate at MIT, while Gediminas Urbonas is an Associate Professor at MIT’s program in Art, Culture and Technology.

Join the conversation on zoom:

https://kunstakademiet.zoom.us/j/64691680528?pwd=NG8yTUZvTWhVcWpDcWFHeFR6NFpoZz09

Passcode: 420824

The New Mud is part of an ongoing artistic research project Digital Materialities at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, which invites artists and researchers to think collectively from and about the materials on the basis of which we build our allegedly immaterial digital life.

Rikke Luther’s current work explores the new interrelations created by environmental crisis as they relate to landscape, language, politics, financialisation, law, biology and economy, expressed in drawn images, photography, film, and pedagogical strategies. Since her participation in the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo in 2016 she has been working solo. Prior to that, Luther worked exclusively in art collectives. She was a co-founder of Learning Site (active 2004 to 2015) and of N55 (active with original members from 1996 through to 2003). In 2021 Luther defended the PhD Concrete Aesthetics: From Universal Rights to Financial Post-Democracy. It will be published in 2022 with extended texts by Esther Leslie and Jaime Stapleton.

The exhibition is supported by the Danish Art Foundation and the Danish Art Workshops.

Since their first residency in Astrid Noack’s Atelier in 2013 the two artists Seçil Yersel and Özge Açıkkol from Turkey have been preoccupied with the work and life of Astrid Noack. During their stay in ANA in November they will gather their experience with Noack around the question; “How to read Astrid Noack”.

When you look at Astrid Noack in the linear chronological art history context you get an overall impression of her and of her production. What Seçil Yersel will try to do is to make a “circular-affect based history reading”, where she will come close to places and people that were not in the circle of Noack; from different time periods and geographies. So, the interpretation of Noack together with Yersel’s personal mapping of other women figures both from Istanbul and other cities, forms and stories will hint the potentiality of the “affect power”.

Özge Açıkkol will investigate both what physically surrounds the sculptress herself and her studio. As a reaction to Seçil Yersel’s insight/inside curiosities, she will construct a diary from Astrid Noack’s voice and perspective trying to imagine the past time and space in which Astrid Noack has lived. In her essay Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? the art historian Linda Nochlin writes that “In every instance, women artists and writers would seem to be closer to other artists and writers of their own period and outlook than they are to each other.” Following this very critical aspect in art history, Açıkkol’s intention is to try to formulate connections between herself, Astrid Noack and other women artists and search for another type of relational surrounding for her, based on her artistic intelligence and horizon.

On Saturday 27 November at 14.00 – 16.00 the two artists are inviting you for “a walk and a look” that will start and end at ANA. After a short introduction to the performative walk, we will stroll around with guidance following some of the imaginary routes that Astrid Noack’s might have moved along. Together in silence we will experience some pieces of works, corners, spots and things in “sustained attention”. Coming back to ANA we will share the experiences around the table while Astrid Noack’s “Young Man Planting a Tree” will witness the process from the corner of the room.

Özge Açıkkol and Seçil Yersel are co-founders of the artist collective Oda Projesi (2000) together with Güneş Savaş. Besides their collective work they work individually.

Seçil Yersel has a background in sociology and art. She works with photography + text + sound and her main concern is to capture the potentials of the in-between space and focusing on the present moment and memory; with a therapeutic approach she makes montages and uses different exhibition methods including performative talks.

Özge Açıkkol works at the intersection of art, socio-spatial practices, literature, and pedagogy. She is a collector of situational usages of İstanbul’s public spaces and she is in search of alternative pedagogies related with those spatial practices. Since 2013, with Oda Projesi she questions the transformatory capacity of ‘the artist mother’. Hence, she is interested in reclaiming the fundamental and invisible act of “caring” as a support structure in the public sphere beyond its trapped interpretations in the private.

Oda Projesi is an artist collective based in Istanbul. It was founded by Özge Açıkkol, Güneş Savaş and Seçil Yersel who turned their collaboration into a project in 2000. From January 2000 their space in Galata functioned as a non-profit independent space, hosting projects, gatherings and acts up until 2005, when Oda Projesi was evicted from the apartment due to gentrification. Since 2005 Oda Projesi continues to work with different mediums and create spaces for meetings and gatherings.

Peter Petersen (1953-2020) – a mourning play, takes its starting point in my father’s life and death, as well as the system that took part in killing him.

On a late Saturday morning at the end of September last year my father collapsed and died, just 67 years old. The last 15-20 years of his life were marked by depression, unemployment, illnesses, social isolation, severe opioid- and alcohol abuse, a prison sentence, an economy in ruins, and a life on the edge and the bottom of Danish society. My father belonged to that category of people that society no longer needs. He was declared a surplus citizen, an abject-subject, unproductive and reduced to a body that simply needed to be administered, through additional medication and disqualification. In addition to a huge debt and a broken-down house, he left behind large amounts of boxes full of objects he had found in the trash – everything from porcelain figures to old film projectors, things that no one saw any value in any longer. This collection of fragments from his life, his material leftovers, is the framework of the exhibition, which will take the form of several performances in Astrid Noacks Atelier.

The mourning play (’Trauerspiel’) is a dramatic genre within the baroque tragedy, where death and mourning are the main protagonists: here the decay of humans and nature are in focus, the language gets fragmented and everything appears already as a ruin, or in the process of becoming one. By leaning into this tragical theater-form I allow myself to dwell on that which is decaying, on that which is no longer. By staging my father’s life and death, I want to invite the audience to take part in the mourning-process in order to de-individualize the grief. For the mourning is not only mine, every loss also contains a political dimension. The great taboo that surrounds death, means that grief gets privatized and made into something you must get over quickly. But I do not need to get over my loss and I will not let my father’s life disappear into silence. By creating a space around his death and the anger and loneliness that simmers in my grief, I want to open up a discussion of what constitutes a mournable life.

Opening: Saturday 2 October from 16-21 with performances at 16:30, 18:00 and 19:30.

There will also be performances:

Sunday 3 October at 16:30, 18:00 and 19:30.

Wednesday 6 October at 16:30, 18:00 and 19:30.

Thursday 7 October at 16:30, 18:00 and 19:30.

Friday 8 October at 16:30, 18:00 and 19:30.

Saturday 9 October at 16:30, 18:00 and 19:30.

Registration is required at: kbr@astrid-noack.dk. You are also welcome to show up and get a free seat if there is one. The duration of the performance is approx. 40 min. There is free admission and seats for a maximum of 10 people at a time.

NOTE! After 9 October and until 24 October, the exhibition will consist of a video documentation of the performance.

The video documentation is open:

Saturday 16  and Sunday 17 October at 13-16

Sunday 24 October at 13-16.

Trailer: https://player.vimeo.com/video/609739528?h=e05d2c7f4e

The exhibition is supported by The Danish Art Foundation and the Danish Art Workshops.

Pelle Brage has been invited to develop a new social art project in ANA’s mobile children’s studio at Den Bemandede Legeplads in Mimersparken on Nørrebro. Under the title “The Border. A Social Sculpture Experiment”, the project in a critically playful way invites children and young people to discuss our society and the world we live in.

With a focal point in a sculptural installation consisting of a fence and a border barrier, the project investigates and further develops this temporary border. It’s about rules – why some can get through and others not. Does a visa require any specific actions? Or are there any questions you need to answer to pass the border? Do you have to be approved by the children?

The idea of ​​”The Border. A Social Sculpture Experiment” is to bring together a group of children and young people in a creative activity where the content is developed at a children’s level. This in a local area, where the children, in continuation of current initiatives and legislation (such as the ghetto law), are confronted on a daily basis with issues of discrimination and unequal access to common resources on the basis of ethnicity and nationality.

The project is supported by Huskunstnerordningen (the Danish Art Foundation)