After the Sun—Forecasts from the North
Buffalo AKG Art Museum
April 26 - August 19, 2024
The Buffalo AKG Art Museum presents After the Sun—Forecasts from the North, a new exhibition that surveys a generational response to the precarious state of our natural environment. Organized by Helga Christoffersen, Curator-at-Large and Curator of the Nordic Art & Culture Initiative at the Buffalo AKG, After the Sun is on view in the new Jeffrey E. Gundlach Building, after which it will travel to Gammel Strand in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Featuring the work of twenty artists with strong ties to Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, After the Sun considers how emergencies at a Northern latitude reverberate globally. The exhibition presents new artistic engagements that build on the Nordic region’s tradition of depicting the natural world, and asks what art is generated in response to the intensifying global climate crisis.
“As the inaugural exhibition of the Nordic Art & Culture Initiative at the Buffalo AKG, After the Sun is a fitting example of the prescient, global projects that define the Buffalo AKG,” said Janne Sirén, Peggy Pierce Elvin Director. “The Nordic Art & Culture Initiative creates an unprecedented international platform for new art and pressing subject matter. We are honored to present After the Sun and to partner with Gammel Strand in Copenhagen to extend the exhibition’s reach across the Atlantic.”Cathleen Chaffee, Charles Balbach Chief Curator, observed, “This remarkable exhibition envisions the scope of our vulnerability as a species, as we navigate an existence that is increasingly, consistently in extremis. Encompassing artists who approach the pressing subject of climate change from vastly different perspectives, it is a case study for the ways artists can help us see otherwise opaque aspects of life in a time of natural and manmade crises.”
The exhibition’s title is drawn from Danish writer Jonas Eika’s collection of short stories Efter Solen (After the Sun), winner of the Nordic Literature Prize in 2019. Eike has said that the book emerged from a sense of personal and political exhaustion, a feeling that he believes is shared by many: “That the way we imagine the future is mostly just a continuation of what there is today. The future, as a potential for change and a source of political energy, seems to be missing.”
As Eika’s book addresses the profound challenge of responding to forces that pull us apart, the artists included in After the Sun grapple with how artistic practice may or may not succeed at meaningfully shaping the future world.
Occupying the entire first floor of the Buffalo AKG’s new Jeffrey E. Gundlach Building’s special exhibition galleries along with outdoor space on the museum campus, After the Sun presents artistic responses to the climate crisis that range from the analytical to the speculative, the poetic to the political. Some artists consider the repercussions of temporary solutions to climate change, among them Lea Porsager (born Frederikssund, Denmark, 1981, lives in Copenhagen, Denmark), in whose hands a sequence of massive disused windmill blade fragments become poignant ruins. Amitai Romm’s (born Jerusalem, 1985, lives in Copenhagen, Denmark) slight but throbbing sculptures and sound work are among several in the exhibition to approach science and data related to the environment from a visceral, embodied position. Olof Marsja’s (born Gällivare, Lapland, Sweden, 1986, lives in Gothenburg, Sweden) plant-human hybrid sculptures are contemporary guardian figures, related to indigenous knowledge and the artist’s own Sámi tradition. These, and all the artists in After the Sun explore what a meaningful engagement with nature might mean today and how we might forge practical, theoretical, and metaphysical paths forward.
Participating Artists
Sigurður Ámundason (b. 1986, Reykjavik, lives in Reykjavik, Iceland),
Felipe de Ávila Franco (b. 1982, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, lives in Helsinki, Finland),
Á. Birna Björnsdóttir (b. 1990, Reykjavik, lives in Amsterdam, The Netherlands),
Ragna Bley (b. 1986, Uppsala, Sweden, lives in Oslo, Norway),
Sara-Vide Ericson (b. 1983, Bollnäs, Sweden, lives in Älvkarhed, Sweden),
Carola Grahn (b. 1982, Jåhkåmåhkke, Lapland, Sweden, lives in Malmö, Sweden),
Alma Heikkilä (b. 1984, Pälkäne, Finland, lives in Helsinki, Finland),
Jane Jin Kaisen (b. 1980, Jeju Island, South Korea, lives in Copenhagen, Denmark),
Juha Pekka Matias Laakkonen (b. 1982, Helsinki, lives in Helsinki, Finland),
Linda Lamignan (b. 1988, Stavanger, Norway, lives in Copenhagen, Denmark),
Timimie Märak (b. 1988, Stockholm, lives in Stockholm, Sweden),
Olof Marsja (b. 1986, Gällivare, Lapland, Sweden, lives in Gothenburg, Sweden),
Santiago Mostyn (b. 1981, San Francisco, lives in Stockholm, Sweden),
Lea Porsager (b. 1981, Frederikssund, Denmark, lives in Copenhagen, Denmark),
Amitai Romm (b. 1985, Jerusalem, lives in Copenhagen, Denmark),
Vidha Saumya (b. 1984, Patna, India, lives in Helsinki, Finland),
Inuuteq Storch (b. 1989, Sisimiut, lives in Sisimiut, Greenland),
Jenna Sutela (b. 1983, Turku, Finland, lives in Berlin),
Apichaya [Piya] Wanthiang (b. 1987, Bangkok, lives in Oslo, Norway),
Simon Daniel Tegnander Wenzel (b. 1988, Hamburg, lives in Oslo, Norway)
After the Sun—Forecasts from the North is the inaugural exhibition of the Buffalo AKG Nordic Art & Culture Initiative. It is co-organized by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and Gammel Strand, Copenhagen, Denmark.
The Buffalo AKG Nordic Art & Culture Initiative is a unique platform in North America for art of the Nordic region in a broad sense, encompassing artists whose practices are tied to a landmass that includes Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, the Faroe Islands, Greenland, and the Åland Islands. The Initiative is dedicated to organizing programs and exhibitions at the Buffalo AKG and in the Buffalo community with artists and cultural producers across disciplines who are substantively associated with the Nordic region. As part of the Initiative, over the next sixty years the Buffalo AKG will develop North America’s leading collection of contemporary art from the Nordic region.
BUFFALO AKG ART MUSEUM
1285 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, New York 14222
