Glaciers, sea ice and permafrost are melting. Land is subsiding and slipping away. Lakes recede, lakebeds collapse and swelling mud flows towards the oceans at an ever-increasing pace.

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.

FROM THE LOCAL TO THE UNIVERSAL—AND BACK AGAIN
While AHC has served as artistic host institution for Rikke Luther’s practice-based postdoctoral research, the project has been scientifically anchored—not within a faculty of the humanities, as is often the case for artistic research—but at the natural sciences institute ROCS at the Universities of Copenhagen and Iceland, led by Professor Katherine Richardson, former member of the Danish Council on Climate Change (2019–2025) and head of the Planetary Boundaries research project. Luther has also collaborated closely with biochemist Karina Krarup Sand from the Globe Institute, whose research explores the intersections of genetics, geology and archaeology.

It is from their groundbreaking research that Dust & Flow takes much of its inspiration. Additionally, the film draws on empirical material gathered by Luther on her research journeys, and on a particular conceptual approach to the idea of ‘greater scale’, inspired by anthropologist Anna Tsing.

Rikke Luther explains:

“I’m often asked whether I follow a particular method in my research. I don’t. The only methodology I swear by is Anna Tsing’s wonderful concept of ‘greater scale’—which essentially means moving from the local and ‘particular’ to the larger frameworks of universal planetary existence, and back again—without altering my research question. Dust & Flow explores many things: the deep history of ocean-land relations, as well as the contemporary, local, social, political and biochemical consequences of the emergence of new mudscapes.”

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INFO

Rikke Luther: Dust & Flow – Mud in the Earth System
2 May – 16 Aug 2025

Opening Friday 2 May at 4:00-7:00. Everyone is welcome!

Room Room
Thoravej 29
2400 Copenhagen NV

On Wednesday 4 June at 18:30, we invite you to join us at Room Room for a talk with Katherine Richardson, who will discuss her research alongside a new text she has written for an upcoming publication on Rikke Luther’s practice.

The exhibition has been realised with support from the Novo Nordisk Foundation, the Danish Arts Foundation, Baltic Art Center and AHC. Dust & Flow: Muds, Movement, Time, Scale has been commissioned by NAARCA, with production and research hosted by ROCS.

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ABOUT RIKKE LUTHER
Artist and PhD Rikke Luther (b. 1970) graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 1998. In her current practice, she investigates the movements in the ‘Earth System’ brought about by human-driven climate, environmental and biodiversity crises. Her work engages with themes relating to emerging landscapes, language, politics, economics, law, biology and geology, expressed through drawn mappings, photography and film.

Luther’s work has been presented at biennales and triennales including Venice, Singapore, Echigo-Tsumari, Auckland, Gothenburg and São Paulo; in museums and institutions such as HKW, the Smart Museum, Kunsthaus Bregenz, The New Museum and Museo Tamayo; in exhibitions including Beyond Green: Towards a Sustainable Art, 48C Public.Art.Ecology and Weather Report: Art & Climate Change; as well as at film festivals including CPH:DOX and the Perth International Film Festival.

MORE ABOUT RIKKE LUTHER’S POSTDOCTORAL PROJECT
Ocean-Lands: Mud in the Earth System explores both the social and bio-communicative effects of shifting sea and land mudscapes, as part of a broader attempt to build a new ethical and aesthetic public language capable of communicating the crisis facing our Earth system.

Luther’s postdoctoral research is academically anchored at Queen Margrethe’s and Vigdís Finnbogadóttir’s Interdisciplinary Research Centre on Ocean, Climate, and Society (ROCS), based at the Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate, Globe Institute. The project is funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation and ROCS.

In collaboration with AHC, she is also working on a forthcoming publication featuring contributions from Esther Leslie, Karina Krarup Sand and Katherine Richardson.

You can listen to a conversation between Rikke Luther and Karina Krarup Sand, recorded in November 2023 on the occasion of Luther’s exhibition Mud in the Earth System at Astrid Noack’s Atelier, here.