An excellent review by Ania Szremski on the exhibition and Nika Fontaine work at 4 columns: “Goodbye, World”. On thinning ice: an environmental anti-memorial in Sweden .
4 Columns feat Nika Fontaine
The story of creating this exhibition and the resulting images of this magnificent frozen world, the spine-tingling sublimity of its vast bleached expanse, which so few people will ever get to see, are all so spectacular, it’s perhaps inevitable that they would overshadow the artworks themselves. Some of them are wholeheartedly forthright interpretations of the theme. For instance, Montreal-born, Berlin-based artist Nika Fontaine offered a mound of active charcoal, like an extinguished funeral pyre, studded with cartoonish human skulls formed out of bread, with smoke wafting from burning frankincense. “It is only fair of you [Earth] to put an end to our selfishness . . . I welcome your wrath as an act of self-care and preservation,” Fontaine writes in an accompanying letter. There’s also Berlin-based Veit Schütz’s Aggregat Weltenbrand (Aggregate World in Flames) (2017), an old-fashioned, lacquered wooden radio equipped with a glowing 3D print of the planet Earth. In the original iteration of the artwork, the viewer could depress a red button to ignite a series of explosions across the miniature world. (A GIF on the exhibition website shows what this looks like, but the actual work installed on the ice floe is an “environmentally friendly” copy, sans electronics.)
by Ania Szremski, 2/19/2021
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