©Andreas Moser

Uta Kögelsberger: "The human-made, often industrial forests are a reminder of what we have already lost."

Forest Complex is the new project by London-based artist Uta Kögelsberger. Her artistic practice focuses on the social and political effects of climate change and its impact on forests, which she expresses in photography, videos and sculptural sound installations. For Kögelsberger, climate change is at the heart of all the pressing issues of our time. The subject matter of Forest Complex follows on from Fire Complex and Cull, which attracted worldwide attention and for which she received the prestigious Royal Academy Wollaston Award. Fire Complex was a response to the 2020 Castle Fire in California, which destroyed 174,000 hectares of forest and 14% of the world's Giant Sequoia population. Kögelsberger herself lost her house in the fire. Her replanting effort mobilised local communities, and in that contributed amongst others to a new bill being introduced to Congress to protect giant sequoias.

Due to recognition she had achieved through Cull, she was contacted by Hans Joachim Gögl the curator of Inn Situ at the BTV Stadtforum in Innsbruck to develop a project about the Alpine forests in Austria. Forest Complex, a project for which the artist meticulously visited and documented the region for months, opened at INN SITU in April. In this programme series, international artists are invited by the BTV to respond to the Tyrol/Vorarlberg region. Forest Complex had its premiere on 17 April. In her slideshow installation Roots, she was able to document the massive consequences of the 2018 storm Vaia, which destroyed 15 million trees in the Alpine forests, and the subsequent process of reconquest by the environment. At the same time as her project, Austria relaxed its climate policy and introduced the "Klimafitter Wald" initiative, the testing of new tree species for a forest adapted to climate change.

5 May 2024

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