Renature, presented at Bildhalle Zürich, explores the shifting relationship between nature, perception and materiality in contemporary lens-based art. Bringing together the work of Adam Jeppesen, Douglas Mandry, Inka & Niclas and Joost Vandebrug, the exhibition questions how the organic world is framed through technology and visual culture, whilst foregrounding the physical materials that shape photography. Together, these artists open a dialogue around nature as something seen, shaped and felt. They are not merely documented, but transformed. Their works reject permanence and perfection, instead embracing fragility, artifice and transformation as essential elements of a contemporary visual language.
Finnish-Swedish due Inka & Niclas interrogate the over-consumption and oversaturation of environmental imagery within visual culture, revealing how cameras and screens shape our understanding of the Earth. In Family Portraits, the artists, along with their two children, collect self-portraits taken in idyllic scenery. They wear suits that bounce the light of the flash back into the camera lens, making them anonymous and radiate in the photographs. Alongside this, Joost Vandebrug assembles imagined terrains from fragments of visual memory gathered through travel experiences. His pieces emerge as intuitive constructions defined by vulnerability, imperfection and the poetry of the everyday.
Material experimentation defines the practices of Adam Jeppesen and Douglas Mandry. In Jeppesen’s ongoing Tanks series, cyanotype-printed fabric is suspended within oil-filled glass containers, transforming photographic images into sculptural forms. Mandry works with archival pictures of Swiss glaciers from the early 20th century, transferring them onto geotextiles once used in the Alps to protect melting ice. The fabric thus becomes both surface and witness to the climate crisis, binding fading historical records to contemporary environmental reality. Renature expands photography into a process of transformation. It is a provocation on how nature is seen, shaped and remembered within a changing visual landscape.
Renature is at Bildhalle, Zürich until 23 May: bildhalle.ch
Words: Emma Jacob
Image Credits:
1. © Inka & Niclas Title: 4K Ultra HD XXVII, 2019 Courtesy of Bildhalle.
2. © Inka & Niclas. Title: G-Type Main Sequence I, 2025 Courtesy of Bildhalle.
3. © Inka & Niclas. Title: Family Portrait XIX 2025 Courtesy of Bildhalle.
