By Lars Bang Larsen
Exhibition text, Picture the Sky, Kunsthal Aarhus, 2024
When Nanna Debois Buhl fell in love with yarn in 2020, it prompted a reset of her work: if she was to follow the yarn, she would have to learn something different and, in doing so, unlearn aspects of herself as an artist.
Buhl decided to train at a weaving studio in Greve – a place that is, in more ways than one, distant from the art scene. This first step also led her towards the outskirts of art for another reason. For the female weaver, the road to institutional acceptance has historically been longer than for female painters and sculptors (though it was by no means easy for them in the first place). Still today, textile art hovers in an undecided and often unappreciated place between art and craft.
Weaving is one of the haunted histories Buhl inhabits and narrates in Picture the Sky; haunted in the sense that what is suppressed and left untold in the prevailing order insists on being expressed, and thereby rightfully acknowledged. There is transformative power in “following the ghosts” as sociologist Avery F. Gordon puts it, as it “is about making a contact that changes you, and refashions the social relations in which you are located.”
A wormhole is opened to the realm of technology as Buhl explores how woven textile and computer code have in common an algorithmic logic. This leads us to Boston, where, in 2022, she researched the historic collaboration between weavers and programmers – among them many (forgotten) women – at and around the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as part of NASA’s Apollo program, which ultimately made possible the moon landing in 1969.
The loom is one technology among several others that Buhl mobilises through time travels and inter- (or intra-)actions between human and machine, gender and representation, art and science. It is, not least, a matter of reconsidering the authorising visualisation of science: diagram, photography, microscopy. As products of the scientist’s intuition about all that arises from our non-knowledge, the images of science can be as strange and dazzling as those of art. Due to their speculations, predictions and aesthetic excess, they become unstable, wavering, and thereby more than mere evidence and proof.
The algorithms likewise perform sovereign operations in Buhl’s work. In Picture the Sky, five generative algorithms transform the basic code for the first moon rocket into oracular, concrete-poetic pattern machines. Using a systematic principle of randomness at the edge of human control, new linguistic and visual constellations are in this way woven forth in a continuous (potentially infinite) experiment that orients the exhibition’s gaze towards the future.
A particularly striking feature of the woven image is the obviousness of its being not one, but (at least) double: it is partly motif, partly yarn or other material. As an image, the textile represents something, and as structured yarn, it points back to the work and technology that created it. It is in and of itself a transportation, an intersection of orders and worlds.
Buhl’s cosmic poetics evokes a corresponding double gaze in which the one cannot exist without the other: the professional artist cannot make it without the weaving studio in Greve, which is connected to space travel and the elite university in Massachusetts, which is again linked to gender struggle and social inequality, just as the handmade artwork and the mechanical scientific image are intertwined.
The loom unravels the world – and with it, history and the sky – only to thread new, seemingly unthinkable connections.