After the Sun—Forecasts from the North to Feature Works by Twenty Artists with Ties to the Nordic Region, Will Open April 26 in Museum’s Gundlach Building

The Buffalo AKG Art Museum announced After the Sun—Forecasts from the North, a new exhibition that will survey a generational response to the precarious state of our natural environment. Organized by Helga Christoffersen, Curator-at-Large and Curator of the Nordic Art & Culture Initiative at the Buffalo AKG, After the Sun will be on view in the new Jeffrey E. Gundlach Building from April 26 through August 19, 2024, after which it will travel to Gammel Strand in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Featuring the work of twenty artists with strong ties to Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, After the Sun considers how emergencies at a Northern latitude reverberate globally. The exhibition presents new artistic engagements that build on the Nordic region’s tradition of depicting the natural world, and asks what art is generated in response to the intensifying global climate crisis.

“As the inaugural exhibition of the Nordic Art & Culture Initiative at the Buffalo AKG, After the Sun is a fitting example of the prescient, global projects that define the Buffalo AKG,” said Janne Sirén, Peggy Pierce Elvin Director. “The Nordic Art & Culture Initiative creates an unprecedented international platform for new art and pressing subject matter. We are honored to present After the Sun and to partner with Gammel Strand in Copenhagen to extend the exhibition’s reach across the Atlantic.”

Cathleen Chaffee, Charles Balbach Chief Curator, observed, “This remarkable exhibition envisions the scope of our vulnerability as a species, as we navigate an existence that is increasingly, consistently in extremis. Encompassing artists who approach the pressing subject of climate change from vastly different perspectives, it is a case study for the ways artists can help us see otherwise opaque aspects of life in a time of natural and manmade crises.”

The exhibition’s title is drawn from Danish writer Jonas Eika’s collection of short stories Efter Solen (After the Sun), winner of the Nordic Literature Prize in 2019. Eike has said that the book emerged from a sense of personal and political exhaustion, a feeling that he believes is shared by many: “That the way we imagine the future is mostly just a continuation of what there is today. The future, as a potential for change and a source of political energy, seems to be missing.” 

As Eika’s book addresses the profound challenge of responding to forces that pull us apart, the artists included in After the Sun grapple with how artistic practice may or may not succeed at meaningfully shaping the future world.

Occupying the entire first floor of the Buffalo AKG’s new Jeffrey E. Gundlach Building’s special exhibition galleries along with outdoor space on the museum campus, After the Sun presents artistic responses to the climate crisis that range from the analytical to the speculative, the poetic to the political. Some artists consider the repercussions of temporary solutions to climate change, among them Lea Porsager (born Frederikssund, Denmark, 1981, lives in Copenhagen, Denmark), in whose hands a sequence of massive disused windmill blade fragments become poignant ruins. Amitai Romm’s (born Jerusalem, 1985, lives in Copenhagen, Denmark) slight but throbbing sculptures and sound work are among several in the exhibition to approach science and data related to the environment from a visceral, embodied position. Olof Marsja’s (born Gällivare, Lapland, Sweden, 1986, lives in Gothenburg, Sweden) plant-human hybrid sculptures are contemporary guardian figures, related to indigenous knowledge and the artist’s own Sámi tradition. These, and all the artists in After the Sun explore what a meaningful engagement with nature might mean today and how we might forge practical, theoretical, and metaphysical paths forward.

After the Sun—Forecasts from the North is the inaugural exhibition of the Buffalo AKG Nordic Art & Culture Initiative. The exhibition is supported by the New Carlsberg Foundation and NorthCape Wealth Management. Additional support is provided by the Danish Arts Foundation and Frame Contemporary Art Finland. Exhibition and individual artist support is granted by the Office of Contemporary Art Norway. 

After the Sun—Forecasts from the North is co-organized by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and Gammel Strand, Copenhagen, Denmark.

Participating Artists

• Sigurður Ámundason (b. 1986, Reykjavik, lives in Reykjavik, Iceland),  
• Felipe de Ávila Franco (b. 1982, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, lives in Helsinki, Finland), 
• Á. Birna Björnsdóttir (b. 1990, Reykjavik, lives in Amsterdam, The Netherlands), 
• Ragna Bley (b. 1986, Uppsala, Sweden, lives in Oslo, Norway), 
• Sara-Vide Ericson (b. 1983, Bollnäs, Sweden, lives in Älvkarhed, Sweden),  
• Carola Grahn (b. 1982, Jåhkåmåhkke, Lapland, Sweden, lives in Malmö, Sweden), 
• Alma Heikkilä (b. 1984, Pälkäne, Finland, lives in Helsinki, Finland),  
• Jane Jin Kaisen (b. 1980, Jeju Island, South Korea, lives in Copenhagen, Denmark),  
• Juha Pekka Matias Laakkonen (b. 1982, Helsinki, lives in Helsinki, Finland),  
• Linda Lamignan (b. 1988, Stavanger, Norway, lives in Copenhagen, Denmark), 
• Timimie Märak (b. 1988, Stockholm, lives in Stockholm, Sweden),  
• Olof Marsja (b. 1986, Gällivare, Lapland, Sweden, lives in Gothenburg, Sweden), 
• Santiago Mostyn (b. 1981, San Francisco, lives in Stockholm, Sweden),  
• Lea Porsager (b. 1981, Frederikssund, Denmark, lives in Copenhagen, Denmark), 
• Amitai Romm (b. 1985, Jerusalem, lives in Copenhagen, Denmark),  
• Vidha Saumya (b. 1984, Patna, India, lives in Helsinki, Finland),  
• Inuuteq Storch (b. 1989, Sisimiut, lives in Sisimiut, Greenland),  
• Jenna Sutela (b. 1983, Turku, Finland, lives in Berlin),  
• Apichaya [Piya] Wanthiang (b. 1987, Bangkok, lives in Oslo, Norway),  
• Simon Daniel Tegnander Wenzel (b. 1988, Hamburg, lives in Oslo, Norway)  

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About the Nordic Art & Culture Initiative

The Buffalo AKG Nordic Art & Culture Initiative is a unique platform in North America for art of the Nordic region in a broad sense, encompassing artists whose practices are tied to a landmass that includes Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, the Faroe Islands, Greenland, and the Åland Islands. The Initiative is dedicated to organizing programs and exhibitions at the Buffalo AKG and in the Buffalo community with artists and cultural producers across disciplines who are substantively associated with the Nordic region. As part of the Initiative, over the next sixty years the Buffalo AKG will develop North America’s leading collection of contemporary art from the Nordic region.

Launched in 2021, the Initiative builds on an important moment in the museum’s history. In 1913, the Albright Art Gallery (as the Buffalo AKG was then known) presented The Exhibition of Contemporary Scandinavian Art, an exhibition that would have a profound impact on the development of art in North America. Future members of the Group of Seven, Canada’s first modern art collective, visited Buffalo to see the show, an event that A. Y. Jackson, one of the Group’s founders, later credited as the Group’s “starting point.” This milestone exhibition was not the last cultural exchange between Nordic countries and the Buffalo AKG. In 1930, the museum also loaned numerous artworks to The Exhibition of American Art for Sweden, which traveled to Denmark after its initial run in Stockholm.

In growing its world-renowned collection of modern and contemporary art since the museum’s founding in 1862, the Buffalo AKG has acquired works by pioneering artists who are professionally or personally associated with the Nordic region. In recent years these have included  Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Pia Arke, Miriam Bäckström, Ragna Bley, Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg, Ida Ekblad, Olafur Eliasson, Paul Fägerskjöld, Per Kirkeby, Santiago Mostyn, Trina Lise Nedreaas, Ragna Róbertsdóttir, Torbjørn Rødland, Marianna Uutinen, Danh Võ, and Ebbe Stub Wittrup.

The Nordic Art & Culture Initiative is supported by the generosity of more than seventy Founding Patrons. The founding Curator of the Buffalo AKG Nordic Art & Culture Initiative is Helga Christoffersen, who previously served as Executive Director of Art Hub Copenhagen and Assistant and Associate Curator at the New Museum in New York.

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About the Buffalo AKG Art Museum

Founded in 1862, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (formerly the Albright-Knox Art Gallery) is the sixth-oldest public art institution in the United States. For more than 160 years, the Buffalo AKG has collected, conserved, and exhibited the art of its time, often working directly with living artists. This tradition has given rise to one of the world’s most extraordinary collections of modern and contemporary art.

In summer 2023, following the completion of the most significant campus development and expansion project in its history, the Buffalo AKG opened anew to the public. The project is funded by a $230 million capital campaign, the largest such campaign for a cultural institution in the history of Western New York, including $195 million raised for construction and $35 million in additional operating endowment funds.

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