What are we looking at when we look at clouds? What do they signify? What can they predict?

 Nanna Debois Buhl’s artist’s book Cloud Behavior is a study of clouds—their materiality, their movements, and their historical significance—through photographs and drawings, essays, and interviews. 

During summer 2018, Buhl photographed clouds on medium-format film and experimented with the images in the darkroom. The result is a series of cloud photographs ranging from neutral registrations of the clouds to dramatically altered and color-saturated images.

 In the book, Buhl’s cloud photographs connect to historical thinking about clouds, to scientific research on cloud behavior, and to the mystical and meteorological contemplation of clouds by Swedish playwright, writer, and artist August Strindberg. In A Blue Book (1907–12), Strindberg believes that he sees cloud formations returning in the same shapes to the same place in the Stockholm sky. He ponders what messages the clouds transmit. 

Today, climate researchers study cloud behavior to understand how global warming affects the movements of clouds and how, conversely, the movements of clouds might affect global warming. Strindberg and climate researchers share an interest in reading signs and omens in the clouds—and do so with the aid of photography and other means of visualization.

This connection is unfolded in various ways in the texts of the book: In a text collage by Ida Marie Hede and Nanna Debois Buhl, three fictive characters photograph clouds and speculate about their movements. In their essays, philosopher Dehlia Hannah and literary scholar Andrea Fjordside Pontoppidan connect Nanna Debois Buhl’s cloud studies with philosophical, scientific and literary contemplations of clouds. And in a conversation between physicist Jan Olaf Härter and Nanna Debois Buhl, they discuss thunderclouds and their possible impact on the future climate. 

The texts are accompanied by pencil drawings, computer simulations and mythological depictions of clouds. Cloud Behavior thus forms a polyphonic, intertwined narrative of clouds across disciplines and time periods.

Bio:
Nanna Debois Buhl is a Copenhagen-based visual artist. She received her M.F.A. from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (2006) and participated in The Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program, New York (2008-09). She is currently a Mads Øvlisen PhD fellow in artistic practice at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and the University of Copenhagen. In her PhD project, Sky Studies: Cosmic Code, Images, and Imaginaries, she studies depictions of space across astronomical, computational, aesthetic, and futurological realms. Her work has been shown at institutions such as the Pérez Art Museum; SculptureCenter; The Studio Museum, Harlem, USA; Bucharest Biennial 7, Romania; MSU Museum of Contemporary Art, Croatia; and Lunds Konsthall, Sweden. She is represented in collections such as the Hasselblad Foundation and Malmö Konstmuseum Sweden; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art; ARKEN Museum of Modern Art; the National Museum of Photography; and Museum for Contemporary Art, Roskilde, Denmark. Her artist’s books have been published by Humboldt Books, Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology, Revolver Publishing, and Officin. 

© The author and publishers
ISBN: 978-87-93883-05-5
English text, 144 pages, 24×29 cm
Edition: 900 copies
Text: Nanna Debois Buhl, Dehlia Hannah, Jan Olaf Härter, Ida Marie Hede, and Andrea Fjordside Pontoppidan
Design: Alexis Mark
Published by Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology and Humboldt Books

Realized with generous support from the Novo Nordisk Foundation, the New Carlsberg Foundation and the Beckett Foundation