PICTURE THE SKY · KUNSTHAL AARUS · DENMARK

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“This practice-based artistic research project […] explores depictions and investigations of space in the overlap of scientific, aesthetic, and speculative realms, in order to re-think well known histories of space travel, computation, art, and astronomy to nurture more complex historical and material textures.“

Nanna Debois Buhl

Consulting with artist Nanna Debois Buhl on "Picture the Sky: Cosmic Code, Images, and Imaginaries", a solo exhibition at Kunsthal Aarhus, Denmark.

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Exhibition Design • Consulting
Work focused on the placement of the artworks, considering general distribution, spaces and scale. The exhibition contains photographs, films, weavings, installations, and algorithm-based works.

Artist
Nanna Debois Buhl

Location
Kunsthal Aaruhs • Denmark

Year
February 2 – April 7, 2024

All images
© 2024 David Stjernholm

The project is developed at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and Copenhagen University, Denmark and Massachusetts Institute of Technology and involves collaborations with scientists from the Niels Bohr Institute and Aarhus University.

In “Picture the Sky” photos, computer algorithms, video, and weaving are used to explore the sky, our fascination with it, and how we use it scientifically and speculatively.

The exhibition spans the ground floor of Kunsthal Aarhus and features three new constellations of works: Helios, Particles and Planets and Lunar. In a cosmic narrative, the exhibition makes surprising connections between Earth and sky, cyborgs and historical figures, individual heroes and heroic collectives, bodies and machines, craft and technology, scientific data and alchemists’ investigations.

Kunsthal Aaruhs • Denmark

Driven by interstellar curiosity, and informed by Buhl’s ongoing conversations with astrophysicists, weavers, programmers, and printmakers, her works in this exhibition connect local and global layers, drawing on vastly different realms of knowledge. Her sites of production are equally diverse: for example, the algorithmic pieces were conceived during a residency at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US, while the meteoritic studies are based on images she generated in a nano-laboratory at University of Copenhagen.

Kunsthal Aaruhs • Denmark

“Via solar photographs, woven diagrams, and computer-generated poetry, Buhl ponders how art and science func­tion as categories and knowledge systems, letting her works and experiments loose in a space where the borders between art and science overlap in fuzzy ways.

One could think of the works in the exhibition as a kind of “strange realism,” following what Ur­sula K. Le Guin writes about the genre of science fiction: “It is a strange realism, but it is a strange reality.”

Kunsthal Aaruhs • Denmark

Nakworks consulted on size, anchoring, composition and placement of the Lunar weavings.

photo 2024 @ VEVFT