Tag: contemporary art

Eija-Liisa Ahtila, “The Power of Trees”

Exhibition at Kew Gardens Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art

Running from April 12 to September 14, 2025

Review by Dr. Suneel Mehmi (first version of an exhibition review for Plantcurator.com)

Images courtesy of Kew Gardens.

What is a portrait of a tree? And what can such a portrait do? What can a tree portrait tell us about ourselves as humans and our systems of representing ourselves and nature? These are some of the questions behind the Finnish visual artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s exhibition ‘The Power of Trees’ at the Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art at Kew Gardens.

The Power of Trees. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. The Power of Trees invites visitors to explore the enduring beauty of trees across art and culture.

A prominent – and spectacular – piece in the exhibition Ahtila’s Horizontal–Vaakasuora offers the living video portrait of a 30-metre-tall spruce in Finland’s boreal forest. The tree is shown as a sublime horizontal, subverting our intuitive perceptions of how to portray a tree and highlighting how the limitations of the film frame can shape understanding since the tree could not be captured as a great vertical but had to be rendered horizontally to capture its majesty.

Alongside the installation are Ahtila’s preparatory works, Anthropomorphic Exercises in Film, which are going to be seen for the first time in the country at Kew. Anthropomorphic Exercises in Film are a series of sketches which cast the trees as human characters in movie scenes. The conception is to foreground and analyse our human ways of seeing through film, one of the forms of representation that dominate our understanding of the world around us.

What I found to be an especially stimulating artwork is Point of View/With a Human. There is a step and in front of it, there are three sections on the tree. The fourth section at the top is a mirror in which we look into. Is this artwork a ladder of the tree into the self? The tree as a spiritual guide for the recognition of the self? Or (even at the same time), a puncturing of human arrogance as you step to look at your face in the top branches of the tree? An insight that our sight and our vision of nature is based on narcissism and ego? That we can we only see ourselves in nature? Nature as ourselves?

Finnish art has traditionally been preoccupied with fragments rather than wholes as we learn from the exhibition curatorial note. What is the artwork saying about human beings as a fragment of nature, as part of nature’s collection of fragments? The fragmented self of human beings in the world of nature?

I found Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s exhibition “The Power of Trees” to be a very well conceptualised thought experiment into how we represent the outside world of nature, but also how we represent the inner world of ourselves through filmic representations. How a portrait and character is built. It is an art of the tree that allows us to know ourselves and the limitations and fabrications of our self-knowledge. The exhibition is playful, earnest, important and stimulating and worth not just one, but repeated visits to tease out its subtlety. After you see it, when you look next at at tree in art, you will definitely look at it differently. And perhaps at yourself too.

The Infinite Colourful Light of the Moving Kaleidoscope – The Spaces In-Between, Tottenham Court Road

The Infinite Colourful Light of the Moving Kaleidoscope – The Spaces In-Between, Tottenham Court Road

08.04.23

FREE ENTRY

Art by Rupert Newman (light artist) and PixelArtworks

It happened unexpectedly. A fine example of serendipity, the right place at the right moment. I had just spent a few hours browsing in Foyle’s and a small independent second-hand bookshop and was just making myself towards Tottenham Court Road. I was musing over the books I had seen and I was thinking to myself that I certainly wasn’t rich enough to have all the books that I wanted to read and to have to keep in my own personal library and to share with my kids. That privilege was reserved for the billionaire or the British Museum.

And there it was. The Infinite Colourful Light of the Moving Kaleidoscope… An awe-struck mass of bodies within a space carved out by futuristic light, right next to the station.

The space is described as a ‘digital portal’ and we are meant to ‘discover a prismatic new experience’. The location of the site is important because it is ‘In-Between’ spaces. One of the installations (or ‘spaces’) reacts to your body as you stand before it. The display is in front of you, above, around four walls. It is a type of immersive, interactive art (four dimensional, they sometimes call it). The experience is touted as semi-religious and the installation is described on a panel as a crystalline cathedral of light’.

So this is why I call it ‘The Infinite Colourful Light of the Moving Kaleidoscope ‘. Light, of course, is associated with Christianity, with enlightenment, progress and truth, things that capitalists like to give lip service to when they put us out of work because of computers and technology (it is always right to rail against the so-called technological progress of the capitalists, since this is the weapon of their hubris). I was in a Chapel service recently and they called the Christian God’s kingdom a place of ‘infinite light’. Art is akin to the Christian religion in our age, perhaps its best substitute.  When you go to an art gallery, there is a hush like there is in the chapel. There is a reverent lowering of the eyes before the icons of the age, just as they gaze up at the icons in a religious setting. All the visual display is impregnated with a colossal and sublime meaning, with divine beauty that is not of this earth… For art is considered to be of the spirit for some (not for me, it is still earthly and profane).

As I moved within this computer generated, geometric space, encased in the ingenuity of man and machine, within light, art, animation, music, the energy of the crowd, I was certainly impressed. It was a novel experience. It was a beautiful experience. Yes, it was even a beautiful experience.

Yet where was the meaning behind it all? I read the panels for each of the three different spaces. There were the described themes. Firstly, ‘A Step Beyond’, the immersion in another digital world. Yet how different was it from the contemporary enveloping of the subject in the age of the computer?  Was the artwork just priming us as digital subjects, a repetition of what was happening in our technologically mediated reality? Secondly, ‘Transcendence’. Yes, the art is beautiful. The beautiful forms of nature are rejuvenated in an encounter with geometry. The translation of the subtle mathematics of the world into the mathematical language of geometry. But what does the viewer get from this? A strict regularisation and stylisation of the beauty of what is for what can be imagined is the staple of most art, which is abstract at heart (even within supposed realism). But what is the status of this new abstraction for us now and why are we being placed within it in this space? Is awe for nature to be replaced for the awe of what man and machine in unity can now do, what imagination and computer code can achieve? ‘Tessellations’ was more of the same thing: animated geometric patterns filled with light. A world of code that surrounds us, like the Matrix, changing, transforming, not sending out any obvious message, not allowing any thought but awe…

Perhaps the difficulty is not the lack of the message but the lack of the training we have to try and understand abstract art and the elusiveness of meaning in abstract, geometric art itself. Perhaps I do not understand the proposed religiosity behind the installation. Certainly, geometric art figures in Islam in Mosque designs and calligraphy as an expression of faith. Perhaps there is a feeling of endless harmony and connection with things that the piece is supposed to evoke. I did not get this feeling. I got the beauty. I did not get the sense of the digital sublime which all the spaces were meant to evoke. I did not feel engulfed, threatened (perhaps the wonders of the technology are supposed to threaten to usurp man). I lack fear – Punjabi men are afraid of nothing and no-one. Especially not code or geometry filled with light. For me, the exhibit was a good waste of time just before I got onto the Tube, but not an inspirational experience or one which provoked much thought, except for the vague idea that I could get together a venue for something like it and make a bit of money off it… To be really honest, it was like being in a screensaver.