After the Sun—Forecasts from the North to Feature Works by Twenty Artists with Ties to the Nordic Region, Will Open April 26 in Museum’s Gundlach Building
From April 26 through August 19, a traveling art exhibition titled After the Sun—Forecasts from the North will be viewable within the entire first floor of the Buffalo AKG’s new Jeffrey E. Gundlach Building, as well as outdoors on the campus. The exhibition – organized by Helga Christoffersen, Curator-at-Large and Curator of the Nordic Art & Culture Initiative at the Buffalo AKG – “will survey a generational response to the precarious state of our natural environment.” This will be done by featuring the works of of twenty artists with strong ties to Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, all of whom have created installations that tell their own stories about how our planet is being adversely affected by climate change. Moreover, the exhibition “considers how emergencies at a Northern latitude reverberate globally.”
The artists contributing to the After the Sun exhibition have taken into consideration the Nordic region’s tradition of depicting the natural world, and modified their works to included an altered state of reality (altered by humans) that represents the adverse planetary conditions that continue to devolve.
After the Sun—Forecasts from the North is the inaugural exhibition of the Buffalo AKG Nordic Art & Culture Initiative.
“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.”
Felipe De Avila Franco | Trillionth Tonne
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 title of the exhibition is drawn from Danish writer Jonas Eika’s collection of short stories Efter Solen (After the Sun), winner of the 2019 Nordic Literature Prize. Eika has said that the book emerged from a sense of personal and political exhaustion, a feeling 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 grappled with the ways in which artistic practice may or may not succeed at meaningfully shaping the future world.
Artists works in the exhibition include:
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) 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.
After the Sun—Forecasts from the North is co-organized by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and Gammel Strand, Copenhagen, Denmark.
Sigurður Ámundason (born 1986, Reykjavik, Iceland, lives in Reykjavik, Iceland)
Felipe de Ávila Franco (born 1982, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, lives in Helsinki, Finland)
Á. Birna Björnsdóttir (born 1990, Reykjavik, Iceland, lives in Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
Ragna Bley (born 1986, Uppsala, Sweden, lives in Oslo, Norway)
Sara-Vide Ericson (born 1983, Bollnäs, Sweden, lives in Älvkarhed, Sweden)
Carola Grahn (born 1982, Jåhkåmåhkke, Lapland, Sweden, lives in Malmö, Sweden)
Alma Heikkilä (born 1984, Pälkäne, Finland, lives in Helsinki, Finland)
Jane Jin Kaisen (born 1980, Jeju Island, South Korea, lives in Copenhagen, Denmark)
Juha Pekka Matias Laakkonen (born 1982, Helsinki, Finland, lives in Helsinki, Finland)
Linda Lamignan (born 1988, Stavanger, Norway, lives in Copenhagen, Denmark)
Timimie Märak (born 1988, Stockholm,Sweden, lives in Stockholm, Sweden)
Olof Marsja (born 1986, Gällivare, Lapland, Sweden, lives in Gothenburg, Sweden)
Santiago Mostyn (born 1981, San Francisco, California, United States, lives in Stockholm, Sweden)
Lea Porsager (born 1981, Frederikssund, Denmark, lives in Copenhagen, Denmark)
Amitai Romm (born 1985, Jerusalem, Israel, lives in Copenhagen, Denmark)
Vidha Saumya (born 1984, Patna, India, lives in Helsinki, Finland)
Inuuteq Storch (born 1989, Sisimiut, Greenland, lives in Sisimiut, Greenland)
Jenna Sutela (born 1983, Turku, Finland, lives in Berlin, Germany)
Apichaya [Piya] Wanthiang (born 1987, Bangkok, Thailand, lives in Oslo, Norway)
Simon Daniel Tegnander Wenzel (born 1988, Hamburg, Germany, lives in Oslo, Norway)
The exhibition is supported by the New Carlsberg Foundation. The exhibition is made possible through the generosity of NorthCape Wealth Management. Additional support is provided by the Danish Arts Foundation and Frame Contemporary Art Finland. Individual artist support is granted by the Office of Contemporary Art Norway.
About the Nordic Art & Culture Initiative
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.
Launched in 2021, the Initiative builds on an important moment in the museum’s history. In 1913, the Albright Art Gallery (as the Buffalo AKG was then known) presented The Exhibition of Contemporary Scandinavian Art, an exhibition that would have a profound impact on the development of art in North America. Future members of the Group of Seven, Canada’s first modern art collective, visited Buffalo to see the show, an event that A. Y. Jackson, one of the Group’s founders, later credited as the Group’s “starting point.” This milestone exhibition was not the last cultural exchange between Nordic countries and the Buffalo AKG. In 1930, the museum also loaned numerous artworks to The Exhibition of American Art for Sweden, which traveled to Denmark after its initial run in Stockholm.
In growing its world-renowned collection of modern and contemporary art since the museum’s founding in 1862, the Buffalo AKG has acquired works by pioneering artists who are professionally or personally associated with the Nordic region. In recent years these have included Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Pia Arke, Miriam Bäckström, Ragna Bley, Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg, Ida Ekblad, Olafur Eliasson, Paul Fägerskjöld, Per Kirkeby, Santiago Mostyn, Trina Lise Nedreaas, Ragna Róbertsdóttir, Torbjørn Rødland, Marianna Uutinen, Danh Võ, and Ebbe Stub Wittrup.
The Nordic Art & Culture Initiative is supported by the generosity of more than seventy Founding Patrons. The founding Curator of the Buffalo AKG Nordic Art & Culture Initiative is Helga Christoffersen, who previously served as Executive Director of Art Hub Copenhagen and Assistant and Associate Curator at the New Museum in New York.
Lead image: Apichaya [Piya] Wanthiang – Some Body Else
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