News
The 4th of June 18:30 Earth Scientist Katherine Richardson will present her research and the chapter ‘A Muddy Diary’ for the coming book Mud … and the Earth System at exhibition Dust & Flow at ROOM ROOM, Art Hub Copenhagen, Thoravej 29.
The film Dust & Flow: Muds, Movement, Time, Scale world premiered at the Copenhagen Documentary Filmfestival CPH:DOX 2025 and is screened at ROOM ROOM until the 16th of August.
Dust & Flow engages with new scientific climate research, offering an alternative language for articulating the radical transformations occurring within the Earth system.
Later this year a book, Mud … and the Earth System, will be published. The volume brings together a selection of my own recent art works, mappings, and film scripts, with new texts by leading Earth scientists and historians.
Prof Esther Leslie brings political aesthetics to bear on the history of the sublime in relation to the new arctic muds. The renown Earth scientist Prof Katherine Richardson was the lead author of the ground-breaking Planetary Boundaries paper of 2023. For this publication, Katherine has written A muddy diaryfor the Earth System. Finally, the geo-geneticist Dr Karina K. Sand’s essay explores the concept of deep-time ecosystems in relation to eDNA and the life/non-life of bio-minerals within arctic muds.
A further book, based on my doctoral research, Concrete Aesthetics: From Universal Rights to Post-Democracy (2021)will also be published this year. It comes with an introductory essay by Esther Leslie, and a partner-essay essay by Jaime Stapleton. The Global Commons: In Context recounts the tangled history of the concept that led to the Concrete Aesthetics project, and explores that concepts’ fate in an era of accelerating heat and fracturing international relations.
About the work
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 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.
About
Rikke Luther is an artist and researcher. The current work examines the movements in the Earth System stemming from the man-made environmental and biodiversity crises.
The Ocean-Lands: Mud Within the Earth System builds on previous works exploring the interrelations between landscape, language, politics, financialisation, law, geology, biology, economics, natural history and the Earth System. Research outputs take the form of film and large-scale drawn mappings, distributed in exhibitions, screenings, publications, and pod casts.
Luther is currently finishing the post-doctoral practice-based artistic research The Ocean-Lands at Queen Margrethe’s and Vigdís Finnbogadóttir´s Interdisciplinary Research Centre on Ocean, Climate, and Society (ROCS), Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate (CMEC), Globe Institute, Copenhagen University, DK under Prof. Katherine Richardson.
Luther’s work has been presented in Biennales and Triennales [such as Venice, Singapore, Echigo-Tsumari, Auckland, Göteborg and Sao Paulo]; museums [such as Arnhem, Moderna Museum, Kunsthaus Bregenz, The New Museum, Museo Tamayo, Smart Museum]; exhibitions [like 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].
Contact: Rikke.Luther@Proton.me
More
When are the books planned to be published?
Late 2025. They will cost around 30€ each and can be ordered on this site and can be found in libraries & book shops around the world.
What is the Post doc about, when & where was it done?
2023 – 2024: The Ocean-Lands: Mud Within the Earth System, under Prof Katherine Richardson at ‘Queen Margrethe’s and Vigdís Finnbogadóttir´s Interdisciplinary Research Centre on Ocean, Climate, and Society’ (ROCS), Center for Marcoecology, Evolution and Climate (CMEC), The Globe Institute, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
Brief project description
The Ocean-Lands: Mud Within the Earth System is an art practice-based research project, examining ‘mud-scapes’ and the social, political, and bio-chemical, effects of their motion.
For millennia, ‘static muds’ facilitated cultural exchanges across legal boundaries. Those once secure muds are now in motion. Glaciers and inland ice melt, as mudflats and swamps reclaim space from human occupation. Permafrost melts and
sinks, as elsewhere land slips, lakes recede and their beds collapse. Swelling muds slide toward the oceans, facilitating the increasingly garbled circulations of the Earth System.
The Ocean-Lands reflects on, and augments, work developing across other disciplines that are beginning to mark out a Venn diagram of intersecting concerns. At present, no single discipline spans the central intersection. The Ocean-Lands looks toward that future discipline, with the objective of contributing a new ethical-aesthetic public language capable of communicating the shifts occurring within the Earth System.
The project explores two, inter-related, questions: ‘The Social-Organisational Effects of the Ocean-Land Muds in Motion’ and ‘The Bio-Communicative Effects of the Ocean-Land Muds in Transition’. Each devolves into a series of interrelated sub-questions, or tributaries, reflecting the transitional, circulatory, and uncertain, nature of the developing mud crisis.
These questions, will be explored, and expanded on, in a continuous, iterative, process between academic and creative works, drawing on fieldwork in Iceland, Greenland, Svalbard, Gotland and Denmark. Artistic outputs will take the form of four large-scale visual-cognitive maps, seven exhibitions, a book, and narrative-orientated documentary film, with immediate target groups in art and academia and, more widely at the different medias of the public sphere.
(Copenhagen, December 2022)
What is the Concrete Aesthetics: From Universal Rights to Financial Post-Democracy?
In April 2021 the Ph.D. Concrete Aesthetics: From Universal Rights to Financial Post-Democracy was defended with Esther Leslie (Political Aesthetics, Birkbeck, London University); Kim West (writer and curator) and Solveig Gade (IKK, Copehagen University) as opponents. In the assement the commity writes: ’The dissertation format is breaking new ground in its conception of how artistic practice, artistic research, and academic research may be merged, and as such the thesis is significant for both artists and scholars´and continuies ‘Concrete Aesthetics is an original, independent, and important contribution to the emerging field of artistic research. Indeed, the dissertation provides evidence that ”artistic research” may open a “cross-disciplinary” space of investigation that permits the mapping of relations that remain outside the bounds of the separate disciplines of “traditional” academic research. … The dissertation format is breaking new ground in its conception of how artistic practice, artistic research, and academic research may be merged, and as such the thesis is significant for both artists and scholars’.
The Ph.D. is a practice-based Artistic Research Ph.D. at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen; The Institute of Art, Text and Research, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts; and the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT), School of Architecture and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA, US .
Abstract
Concrete is the most widely used building material in the world. Its production is negatively linked to climate change, and its aesthetic to financial speculation and the inequality of what Colin Crouch has termed the ‘post-democratic’ era.
Once the concrete aesthetic spoke the language of progress, universal rights and a better society. Today, that disrupted political aesthetic demands cultural analysis, just as much as the carbon footprint and techno-fossils of concrete demand scientific attention. What does the aesthetic of concrete mean in a globalised world that regularly teeters at the edge of financial crisis and invites a certain environmental one?
The goal of this project is to analyse the historical movement from the Modern era of universal rights and democracy, toward a new era dominated by the global circulation of finance, and the effect that has on aesthetic language and meaning. This will be explored by examining the contrast between the history of concrete within art and cultural practice in the immediate post World War Two era in Europe and the aesthetic and ideological meaning of concrete in today’s globalised economy. That race for economic resources will partly be mapped in the zones of the ‘Global Commons’ – zones outside the borders of national states, such as the ‘High Sea and Deep Sea Bed’. Those areas are deeply affected by the ‘resource wars’, especially over the sand used for concrete production. What does such extraction mean for economics, political life and, crucially, the environment?
The project is theoretical and practical. The theoretical aspect of the research will focus on the social and ideological beliefs that dominated each era to build a picture of how the cultural meaning of concrete has changed. The histories that differentiate one place, or site of action, from another are crucial. The democratic context that once gave Modernist concrete it’s meaning in Scandinavia contrasts sharply with the post-democratic environment of today’s Special Economic Zones. The practical part of this research will employ research-orientated creative practice to explore the potential of art and architectural interventions to generate new, materially embodied, understandings of these developments.
(Copenhagen, February 2017)
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Kochsgade 31 D, 2. sal 5000 Odense C – Denmark
Curriculum Vitae
Education and research
2023-2024 Novo Nordisk Practice-based art Post doc The Ocean-Lands: Mud Within the Earth System, Queen Margrethe’s and Vigdís Finnbogadóttir´s Interdisciplinary Research Centre on Ocean, Climate, and Society (ROCS), Center for Macro-biology, Evolution and Climate (CMEC), Globe Institute, Copenhagen University
2019-2022 Digital Materialities – The New Mud, [Research project], The Royal Danish Art Academy of Fine Art, Denmark
2018-2019 Lunar Concrete – Regolith Extraction in Outer Space and 3D printing on the Moon and in Mud on Earth, [Research project], The Royal Danish Art Academy of Fine Art, Denmark
2017- 2020 Novo Nordisk Practice-based art PhD Concrete Aesthetics: From Universal Rights to Financial Post-Democracy, Institute of Art and Culture (IKK), University of Copenhagen; The Danish Royal Art Academy of Fine Art, Denmark; ACT, MIT program in Art, Culture and Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA, US.
1991-1998 The Royal Danish Art Academy of Fine Art, Copenhagen, Denmark
PROJECTS
The North Atlantic from a Mud Perspective (working title) (2026) [Exhibition], Kunsthal Aarhus, Danmark (Peter Ole Pedersen)
Dust & Flow (2025) [Exhibition], Room Room, Art Hub Copenhagen, Danmark (Jacob Fabricius)
Mud … and the Earth System (2025) [Publikation] Editors: Esther Leslie, Katherine Richardson, Karina Sand & Rikke Luther
Concrete Aesthetics: From Universal Rights to Financial Post-Democracy (2025) [Publikation] Editors: Esther Leslie, Jaime Stapleton & Rikke Luther
CPH:DOX* – Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival (2025) [Filmvisning], Danmark
En anden økologi: Anti-kapitalistisk håndbog (2025) [Publikation] (ed. Tobias Dias), Antipyrine, Danmark
Ocean-Lands I (2024) [Exhibition], Baltic Art Center, (Helena Selder), Gotland, Sweden
First There is A Mountain (2023) [Exhibition], Blåvandshuk (Tyra Dokkedahl og Stenka Hellfach),
Mud in the Earth System II (2023) [Exhibition], Astrid Noacks Atelier, København, (Katherine Bolt Rasmussen)
BAC episode (2023) [Podcast], Helena Selder (BAC); Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas (MIT), NAARCA (K. Revell)
GRASS Fellow at the GRASS Fellow Program (2022-2024), Uppsala Universitet og Baltic Art Center
More Mud (2022-2024) [Research projekt] Nordic Alliance of Artists’ Residencies on Climate Action (NAARCA); Art Hub Copenhagen; Baltic Art Center, Sweden samt institutioner på Island, Svalbard, Grønland og Finland
Consume By (2022-2023) [Exhibition], Museum Arnhem, (Manon Bratt), Arnhem, Holland
On Moving Ground – Sand, Mud and Planetary Change (2022) [Exhibition], Skaftfell, Iceland [NARCA]
Til Fremtiden (2021-2022) [Public Work], Hærvejen, Viborg Municipalicity, Danmark
Images for the Future (2021) [VR og AR Educational Material], Kunsthal Aarhus, Danmark
Nature in Transition – Shifting Identities (2021) [Exhibition], Nordic House, (Stefánsdóttir & Styrmisdóttir), Reykjavík, Island
Concrete Aesthetics: From Universal Rights to Financial Post-Democracy (2021) [PhD]. Rikke Luther. ACT, MIT & IKK, KU, Danmark
Spoiled Waters Spilled, Manifesta 13 (2020) [Exhibition], (C. Coussonnet & I. Lāce), Frankrig
Revelation Perth International Film Festival (2020) [Film screening], Australien
GIBCA/10th Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, “Part of the Labyrinth” (2019) [Udstilling], Göteborg Naturhistorisk Museum & Modenrna Museum, (Lisa Rosendahl), Sverige
Corruption: We Lost Control Again (2019) [Solo Exhibition], Aarhus Kunsthall, (Jacob Fabricius), Danmark
CPH:DOX* – Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival / Next:Wave (2019) [Film screening], Danmark
Rivers of Emotion, Bodies of Ore (2018) [Exhibition], Kunsthall Trondheim, (Lisa Rosendahl), Trondheim, Norge
Affiliate at Art, Culture and Technology, MIT, Boston, MA, USA (2018)
In Our Present Condition (2018) [Exhibition], (G. Urbonas, L. Bang Larsen, L. Knott), MIT, Cambridge, USA
Live Uncertainty, 32nd Bienal de São Paulo (2016) [Exhibition (Jochen Volz with Gabi Ngcofo, Júlia Reboucas, Lars Bang Larsen), São Paulo, Brasilien
Public Space – Lost and Found, Gediminas (2017) [Publikation] G. Urbones & Ann Lui (eds.,), MIT Press, USA
Sound Art, Sound as a Medium of Art (2016) [Publikation] (ed. Peter Weibel), MIT Press, USA
Public Place in it ́s Melt Down Area, Towards Civic Art (2015) [Talk], ACT, MIT, USA
Design as Survival, Resistance, and Transformative Action (2014) [Talk], Harvard University, Cambridge, USA
Rikke Luther’s work as the founder of Learning Site (2004-2015),selected work:
Audio Dwelling 0.2 (2013-2015) [Exhibition, performances, education and seminars], Sound School Part II, Blekinge, Sweden; Sound School Part I, Blekinge; Copenhagen Malmö Port (CMP), Malmö; European Spallation Source (ESS), Lund Science Park, Malmö, Sverige
The Society Without Qualities (2013) [Exhibition], (Lars Bang Larsen), Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm, Sverige
Living as Form – Archive of Socially Engaged Practices from 1991-2011 (2011) [Exhibition], (Nato Thompson), Creative Time, N.Y., USA
Über Lebenskunst (2011) [Exhibition], (Paula Marie Hildebrandt), Haus der Kulturen den Welt, Germany
The 4th Auckland Triennial – Last Ride in a Hot Air Balloon (2010) [Exhibition], (Natasha Conland), Auckland, New Zealand
48C Public.Art.Ecology (2008) [Public Exhibition], (Pooja Sood), Delhi, India
Weather Report: Art & Climate Change (2007) [Exhibition], (Lucy Lippard), Boulder Museum, Colorado, USA
Belief (2006) [Exhibition] (Fumio Nanjo & Roger Mc Donnald), Singapore Biennale, Singapore
Beyond Green: Towards a Sustainable Art (2005-2006) [Exhibition, 9 museums], (Stephanie Smith), Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, US
LAND, ART: A Cultural Ecology Handbook (2006) [Publikation] ed. Max Andrews, RSA publication, London, UK
Rikke Luther’s work as co-founder of N55 (1994-2003), selected work:
The Interventionists – Art in the Social Sphere (2004) [Exhibition], (N. Thompson & G. Scholette), MASS MOCA, USA
Living Inside the Grid (2003) [Exhibition], (Dan Cameron), The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, US
We Are All Sinners (2002-03) [Exhibition], (Magalí Arriola), Museo Tamayo, Mexico City & MARCO, Monterrey, Mexico
Big Torino (2000) [Exhibition], (Michelangelo Pistoletto), Turin, Italien
Days of Hope – 49th Venice Biennale (2001) [Exhibition], (Maia Damianaovic), Italien
LKW (Leben, Kunst und Werk) (2000) [Exhibition, (Paulo Bianchi), Kunsthaus Bregenz, Østrig
Mirror’s Edge (1999-01) [Exhibition], (Okwui Enwezor), Bild Museet, Umeå, Vancouver Art Gallery, Tramway, Scotland mfl.
Come Closer-90`s art from Scandinavia and its predecessors, (1998) [Exhibition], (Maria Lind), Liechtenstein
NowHere, Work in Progress, (1996) [Exhibition], (Iwona Blazwick), Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Danmark