Rikke Luther ^(DK)

Rikke Luther’s current work explores the new interrelations created by environmental crisis as they relate to the Earth System. Those relation compass themes related to landscape, language, politics, financialisation, law, biology, geology and economy, that expressed in drawn images, photography and film.

Luther’s work has been presented in Biennales and Triennales [such as Venice, Singapore, Echigo-Tsumari, Auckland, Göteborg, Manifesta and Sao Paulo]; museums [such as Moderna Museum, Kunsthaus Bregenz, The New Museum, Museo Tamayo, Smart Museum]; exhibitions [such as Beyond Green: Towards a Sustainable Art, 48C Public.Art.Ecology, Über Lebenskunst and Weather Report: Art & Climate Change]: as well as film festivals [such as CPH:DOX* – Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival and the Perth International Film Festival].

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AHC is artistic host institution for Rikke Luther’s practice based post doc research project on Ocean-Lands: Mud in the Earth System in which she examines the new ‘mud-scapes’ in Iceland, Greenland, and Denmark, focusing on the social, political, and bio-chemical effects, of their motion.

For millennia, static muds facilitated cultural exchanges across legal boundaries. Warming global temperatures result in their motion. Melting glaciers and inland ice result in mud. Ancient mud-flats and swamps reclaim space as human occupation recedes. Permafrost melts and sinks; land slips; lakes recede, and their beds collapse. Swelling muds slide toward the oceans, helping to facilitate the increasingly garbled circulations of the Earth System.

The project explores ‘The Social-Organisational Effects of Ocean-Land Muds in Motion’ and ‘The Bio-Communicative Effects of the Ocean-Land Muds in Transition’, as part of the larger attempt to build a new ethical and aesthetic public language capable of communicating the crisis within the Earth System.

Luther’s post doc is academically hosted at the Research Centre on Ocean, Climate, and Society (ROCS) and Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate, both University of Copenhagen. Her collaboration with AHC will result in a publication on ocean lands and moving muds in 2024.