Mud in the Earth System follows up on Rikke Luther’s The New Mud, which was presented in ANA in 2021. In the first part, Luther through a series of research-based works illuminated, how new unpredictable weather caused by climate change – which relates to human activities – creates new unpredictable mud. In the second part, Luther continues her lengthy investigations into the movements of the mud.

The exhibition partly includes new textiles, stills and research material from the on-going work in relation to the art practice-based research project The Ocean-Lands: Mud Within the Earth System. And partly a work from the former project Concrete Aesthetics: From Universal Rights to Financial Post Democracy (2017-2021). The new work which examines the new ‘mud-scapes’ in Iceland, Greenland, Svalbard and the sea-scape from the perspective of Gotland thus focuses on the social and the political, as well on acceleration and the bio-chemical effects of the mud motion in the landscape – in the geosphere and the biosphere.

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.

As part of the larger attempt to build a new ethical and aesthetic public language capable of communicating the crisis within the Earth System the exhibition explores the social-organisational effects of ocean-land muds in motion and the bio-communicative effects of the ocean-land muds in transition.

The exhibition is supported by the Danish Arts Foundation, the Novo Nordic Foundation, Baltic Art Center and Art Hub Copenhagen (NAARCA).