ATMOSPHERIC OMENS · COPENHAGEN CONTEMPORARY · DENMARK
Nathalie Pozzi
“Atmospheric Omens is an artistic reflection on weather and climate. Based on Nanna Debois Buhl’s residency at CERN in Geneva, the work draws on the CLOUD experiment, where scientists investigate how cosmic rays and atmospheric conditions affect cloud formation—and thus the Earth’s climate. It also connects to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, begun in Geneva during the eerie “Year Without a Summer” in 1816, when a volcanic eruption had caused extreme weather worldwide..“
Nanna Debois Buhl
Consulting with artist Nanna Debois Buhl on "Atmospheric Omens”, part of the exhibition “Soft Robots” at Copenhagen Contemporary, Denmark.
CLOUD Collaboration, CERN
Exhibition Design • Consulting
Work focused on the placement of the artworks, considering general distribution, spaces and scale.
The exhibition contains weaving installations and algorithm-based works.
Artist
Nanna Debois Buhl
Generative algorithm, infinite duration
4 digital Jacquard weavings, 400×150 cm
Location
Copenhagen Contemporary • Denmark
Year
2025
Images
© 2025 David Stjernholm
© 2025 Nanna Debois Buhl
Produced in collaboration with VEVFT, Kvadrat/Innvik
“The exhibition concept is inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s The Nightingale (1843), written at the onset of the last great technological upheaval, the Industrial Revolution. In the fairytale, a natural nightingale that gives the emperor profound joy is replaced by a robot, a golden bird admired by everyone at court for its flawless song. Only when the mechanical bird breaks down does the real nightingale return and save the emperor’s life with its soulful singing. In the story, the machine’s song has no soul.”
Copenhagen Contemporary
“The installation combines large digital weavings based on CERN’s cloud chamber imagery with a generative algorithm which continuously creates new sequences, merging weather-related excerpts from Frankenstein with historical landscape images and the artist’s own photographs of Lake Geneva, where the novel was written. Atmospheric Omens is thus an invitation to travel across time and scale—from particles to clouds, from 19th-century climate anxieties to future weather scenarios.”
Nanna Debois Buhl
Copenhagen Contemporary. Photo: David Stjernholm
The thunder burst at once with frightful loudness from various quarters of the heavens.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. 1831 edition.
Driven by interstellar curiosity, and informed by Buhl’s ongoing conversations with astrophysicists, weavers, programmers, and printmakers, her works in this exhibition connect local and global layers, drawing on vastly different realms of knowledge. Her sites of production are equally diverse: for example, the algorithmic pieces were conceived during a residency at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US, while the meteoritic studies are based on images she generated in a nano-laboratory at University of Copenhagen.
Kunsthal Aaruhs • Denmark
photo 2025 @ VEVFT