Rikke Luther: Dust & Flow – Mud in the Earth System

For millennia, the Earth system has behaved in a way that was largely stable. Until now. Human-induced global heating has set everything into motion, and the most dramatic changes to the landscape are currently unfolding in the Arctic and Antarctic, where the pace is so rapid that scientists are struggling to keep up with the mapping of new biochemical topographies.

For several years, artist Rikke Luther has worked with climate change in her practice-based research—most recently with a specific focus on mud and sediments, and how we, as humans, attempt to comprehend the accelerating transformations that our Earth system is undergoing. As part of her postdoctoral project Ocean-Lands: Mud in the Earth System, for which AHC is the artistic host institution, Luther now presents her research in a new exhibition at Room Room.

“IT TAKES A WIZARD”
The solo exhibition Dust & Flow – Mud in the Earth System features photographic and textile works, but takes its point of departure in the film Dust & Flow: Muds, Movement, Time, Scale, which brings together recent scientific research on mud, environmental DNA and the concept of ‘deep time’.

The film—recently screened at CPH:DOX and selected for Arte, the respected Franco-German TV channel for European arts and culture—contains footage from Luther’s research expeditions to Greenland, Gotland, Iceland and Svalbard. Through a combination of personal and scientific reflections and a poetic, richly imaginative aesthetic, viewers are given insight into the vast changes unfolding in the Arctic—and perhaps even a new ethical and aesthetic language for the unfathomable environmental shifts we are facing.

Dust & Flow is a thought-provoking exploration of our rapidly shifting world—one in which not only science speaks, but also the figure of the ‘wizard’; for that is what it takes to grasp and contain the complex interplay of mudscapes, movement, scale and time.

Source: Room Room