Residency on Ven

In extension of the second workshop weekend on Ven, in September 2024, Danish artist Nanna Debois Buhl remained on the island for a few days in order to produce new work connected both to themes of the Within and Beyond and her ongoing research practice. Below is a short discription of her practice and the images produced on the island, as well as two examples of them.

In her artistic practice Nanna Debois Buhl uses photography, weaving, and generative algorithms to depict and sense transforming landscapes and atmospheric processes. Tensions between prediction and unpredictability at a larger scale are mirrored in her working process: a balancing act between structured systems and unpredictable forces of chance—even chaos.

During her residency on the island of Ven, Buhl experimented with creating celestographs in the deep darkness of late-night skies. The celestogram technique was first conceived by playwright and artist August Strindberg (1849-1912), who exposed his photographic plates directly to the night sky—without lens or camera—in pursuit of a more truthful image of the cosmos. Echoing Strindberg’s gesture, Buhl exposed her plates under the stars and later developed them in a traditional darkroom. In her resulting images, grains of sand and dust begin to resemble stars, meteorites, or drifting nebulae—cosmic forms born of earthly matter.

Buhl’s time on Ven also led her to follow the traces of Sophie Brahe (1559–1643), sister of astronomer Tycho Brahe, who worked alongside him at the Uranienborg observatory while conducting her own investigations into astronomy, alchemy, and plant medicine. Both Strindberg’s speculative approach to photography and Brahe’s research on astronomy and alchemy resonate with Buhl’s photographic experiments, which connect particles and planets, science and speculation.

- Nanna Debois Buhl