Agnes Denes: Exercises in Eco-Logic // Åsa Sonjasdotter: Cultivating Abundance by Alice Godwin
Wheatfield - A Confrontation, New York 1982, by Agnes Dean
It may surprise some to know that Agnes Denes (b. 1931), the legendary artist who once planted a wheatfield in front of the World Trade Centre, spent part of her youth in Sweden. Denes and her family left Budapest after the Second World War and settled in Scandinavia for a few years before travelling to the United States, where Denes still lives in a loft in New York City.
As a teenager, Denes was struck by the movement of birds and had the idea for her first environmental artwork, tracking their migration. Denes recalls the sound of the birds’ beating wings and the darkening skies as they gathered, as well as the mysterious happening when a bird would become disoriented and stop flapping its wings, only to fall to earth. For Denes, the formations and habits of birds resonated with the movement of people and her own experience as a displaced foreigner. For her exhibition at Lunds Konsthall in southern Sweden, Denes revisits her teenage dream with a new film that is something of a personal and artistic homecoming.
In Lund, Denes is placed in dialogue with the Swedish artist Åsa Sonjasdotter (b. 1966). Though the two women have never met and come from different generations, they share ecological and environmental concerns, and both believe in the power of artistic organisation to make real-world change. Sonjasdotter also spent her formative years in Sweden, growing up on a family farm between large cultivated fields that were filled with sugar beets in the summer, but whose run-off water she was warned from drinking because of pesticides. Part artist, part activist, Sonjasdotter is interested in the interconnectedness of humans and plants. Her work often stems from local communities and stretches out to encompass global issues like climate change and human interventions in nature.
Here Sonjasdotter’s central work is the film Cultivating Abundance (2022), which explores the archives of the Swedish Seed Association in Svalöv and their efforts to breed a monoculture of crops. Over ten generations, the association has developed “pure” plants almost emptied of genetic variation, to be crossed with other “pure” crops and generated on an industrial scale. This practice can be perilous because a monoculture lacks the variety needed to survive disease, pests, and changes in the environment. In much the same way that Denes saw the migration of people in the movement of birds, Sonjasdotter sees the selective breeding of humans in this development of crops. Cultivating Abundance highlights the efforts of plant breeder Hans Larsson and the peasant seed association Allkorn to reintroduce local cereal varieties into the ecosystem. Examples of these crops will come to life in the courtyard of the Konsthall over the summer.
Cultivating Abundance (64 minutes. 2022) by Åsa Sonjasdotter.
Sonjasdotter’s cultivated beds are an echo of the wheat field Denes tended for months in 1982 on a landfill that is now Battery Park City in Manhattan. A film at Lunds Konsthall recounts the extraordinary endeavour, which is undoubtedly Denes’ most famous environmental artwork. Towered over by the monoliths of capitalism in the Financial District, the wheatfield confronted the economics of food production and the inequalities between rich and poor. This archival footage reminds us just how impactful the project was, with Denes shown amidst a sea of golden grain in the shadow of skyscrapers. The wheatfield continues to resonate and was reimagined in 2024 at the Art Basel art fair and Tinworks Art in Montana, USA.
The wheatfield is a testament to the way Denes has conjured creative solutions for some of the biggest problems of our time, always to the benefit of humanity. Her method of “benign problem solving” (as she calls it) feels markedly different to the machismo of Land art, which flourished in the 1960s and 1970s. This difference in thinking is evident in the psychographs shown in Lund, which are the results of a series of questionnaires given to art world luminaries from the 1970s, including Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, and Lawrence Weiner. The results reveal certain idiosyncrasies in the way their subjects think and behave; a psychologist describes one as, “overly impressed with his own success and importance.” This series speaks to the way Denes herself views the business of being an artist – envisaging new ways to live as ambitious environmental works, but as investigations into universal truths.
Another of Denes’ key works — Rice/Tree/Burial (1977–79) – is revisited through a series of photographs. This first ecological artwork, conceived in 1969 and re-enacted at Artpark near Niagara Falls in the 1970s, marked a declaration of intent for Denes. In a ritual performance, Denes planted a rice field above the Niagara gorge, chained the trees of a sacred Indian forest, and buried a time capsule filled with Haiku poetry, before she filmed the falls for seven days in tribute to the balance between the forces of nature and humanity. In Lund, a new version of the time capsule will be made, containing messages to the future written by visitors, and buried for a thousand years.
Sonjasdotter also harnesses archival materials from the former institute for Plant Breeding in the German Democratic Republic, as she explores their efforts to develop the perfect potato for large-scale production. The Adretta potato was grown widely across East Germany and the Soviet Union and continues to be a popular crop. Elsewhere, Sonjasdotter examines the fate of three types of kale in Ireland – cultivated, rewilded, and wild – through a series of hanging cloths, scattered with dried flower pods and fragments of photographs.
While there are moments when the paths of these two artists entwine, curators Laura Goldschmidt and Åsa Nacking allow the works of Denes and Sonjasdotter to speak for itself and for connections to develop naturally. The result is a show of quiet nuance that reflects on the ever-growing importance of ecological thinking.
https://lundskonsthall.se/en/exhibitions/2024/agnes-denes