Rikke Luther’s current work explores the new interrelations created by environmental crisis as they relate to landscape, language, politics, financialisation, law, biology and economy, expressed in drawn images, photography, film, and pedagogical strategies. She has held teaching positions in Denmark and given numerous guest lectures around the world. Her work has been presented in Biennales and Triennales [such as Venice, Singapore, Echigo-Tsumari and Auckland], museums [such as Moderna Museum, Kunsthaus Bregenz, The New Museum, Museo Tamayo, Smart Museum] and exhibitions [like Beyond Green: Towards a Sustainable Art, 48C Public.Art.Ecology, Über Lebenskunst and Weather Report: Art & Climate Change]. In 2016 Luther created a new work for the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo. Prior to that, Luther worked exclusively in art collectives. She was a co-founder of Learning Site (active 2004 to 2015) and of N55 (active with original members from 1996 through to 2003).
ABOUT THE WORK
Rikke Luther, Concrete Nature: The Planetary Sand Bank, 2019 Film, 38 minutes All images and script Rikke Luther World premier CPH: DOX (Copenhagen Documentary Film Festival) 2019, Next:Wave competition category.
Each of the meticulously composed images in Rikke Luther's essayistic 'Concrete Nature' is literally rooted in a specific place, its material history and social relations. With concrete as the topic of this beautiful cinematic essay, Luther draws thought-provoking lines between critical moments of modernity - a period whose promises of progress and universal values are materialised in concrete. From the first decades of the 19th century, via the aestheticisation of politics until today, where the seabed is used as a sand mine with disastrous consequences - and possibly on to a future with 3D-printed concrete buildings on other planets. The food for thought is complex, but accessible in Luther's well-written monologue, illustrated by well-chosen and spacious motifs of the both standardised and visionary architecture that concrete has enabled, and the destroyed landscapes that its production has caused.
The film was shot around in and around the MIT campus, Cambridge, Boston, New York, Hudson River, High Fall, London, and includes historical images. The film explores concrete buildings that were politicized before they were constructed, before an architect lent them their particular voice; buildings whose political speech is now being overwritten, rewritten, and erased, by the shifting stands of ideology and environment.