Image: Silkeborg Bad
The review praises the exhibition’s eight participating artists for showing how humans are damaging the Earth, while arguing that even broad images of planetary catastrophe can be rendered beautiful, affecting and otherworldly.
‘We belong to the world. The world does not belong to us’ is the exhibition’s stated premise. It examines human influence on the planet through the global climate crisis and the future ahead.
Karen Gabel Madsen’s work has been singled out for making visitors literally step on images of endangered insects and birds, which the review describes as the most authoritative depiction of what is happening, without intermediaries or complicated explanations.
Visitors enter by stepping on delicate drawings of threatened insects, then encounter beings from underground and objects found on Amager Fælled, through which the past affects the near future. The exhibition also addresses botany’s colonial history and the metaphors of flowers, before moving from the local toward stories of invasions from distant galaxies and future memories from a café in outer space.
The works range from paintings and sculpture to installations and video, encompassing dystopian science fiction, botany and contemporary archaeology. The participating artists are Jeanette Land Schou, Nina Maria Kleivan, Karen Gabel Madsen, Bodil Brems, Henriette C. Hansen, Vicky Steptoe, Pernelle Maegaard and Nanna Gro Henningsen.
