Here's… Mud In Your Eye – New exhibition at Kunsthal Aarhus

Between land and sea, science and storytelling

Mud is what we avoid. What sticks to our shoes and makes our hands dirty. But in the new exhibition Here's… Mud In Your Eye by Rikke Luther at Kunsthal Aarhus, mud unfolds as a living witness to the history of the Earth, a material that stores traces of climate, life and human activity over thousands and millions of years. Layer by layer, mud collects deposits from land and sea, pollen, plant remains, microorganisms, DNA, chemical compounds and traces of human intervention. What sinks to the bottom does not disappear. It remains.

A meeting between art and science

The exhibition moves at the intersection of art and science. Here, research data, visual maps, photography, film, text and drawing are intertwined in a joint attempt to understand the Earth as a complex system. A system where everything is interconnected and where small shifts can have far-reaching consequences.

The Earth as an interconnected system

Changes in climate, ocean currents, biodiversity and human activity do not exist in isolation. They influence each other across time and space. The exhibition explores these connections between ice and ocean, atmosphere and biosphere, humans and nature and shows how mud becomes a hub where these relationships can be read.

Maps as narrative landscapes

The large map works function as visual landscapes of knowledge. They map flows of deposits, energy, life and time. Not as unambiguous explanations, but as open narratives. Scientific insights are translated into colors, shapes and figures that make complex processes sensuous and accessible, without simplifying them.

Photography and film as a process

The photographs document landscapes in motion, places where changes are visible on the surface but continue unseen beneath us. The films take us into the rhythm of research work: fieldwork, laboratories, repetitions and waiting. Knowledge here does not emerge suddenly, but slowly, layer by layer, just like the mud itself.

The archive as an open space

In the rooms with tables and archival material, the audience is invited to linger. Texts, notes, diagrams and drawings lie out front as traces of thinking in process. Not all questions have answers. Many remain open. What can mud tell us about past climates? About the human footprint? About the systems we are a part of and often overlook?

Planetary boundaries and future tracks

The exhibition points towards a recognition that the Earth is not a stable backdrop for human activity, but a sensitive, self-regulating system with planetary boundaries. The mud becomes both material and metaphor: something humble and overlooked, which turns out to contain crucial knowledge about our common future.

Here's… Mud In Your Eye

The exhibition can be experienced during the period:

January 30 - March 15, 2026

Briefly about the exhibition:

Here's… Mud In Your Eye by Rikke Luther, is an artistic research project that examines mud as a landscape and the social, political and biochemical processes associated with it. The exhibition presents large-scale textile works, photographs and films in the underground space of the art hall.