Reading Rämistrasse #166: Mateo Chacón Pino on Refik Anadol at Kunsthaus Zürich

It has been almost two years now since Marv Recinto gave voice to a widely shared feeling amongst those who critically engage with eco-art and its exhibition in a piece in Art Review: Eco Exhibitions Won’t Save Us. One could also ask cynically: how many eco exhibitions until we have averted the coming climatic apocalypse? And perhaps it is not so much a question of the quantity of exhibitions needed, but which exhibitions and which art – a question Recinto brings up herself. Two years later we still don’t have a solution, an art which holds its own aesthetically while representing the complexity of the global ecosystem and local conundrums. Still, the attempt to develop such art and exhibitions, and the critique thereof, remain imperative. And sometimes we also need to point at the hollow gestures that come about when a theme is omnipresent.

Such a case can be found in Refik Anadol’s Glacier Dreams, 2023, currently on view at Kunsthaus Zürich. The poster child for AI-art has quickly risen to stardom both amongst tech-libertarian collectors and institutions thirsty for tech money in recent years. With shows at MoMA and the Serpentine Gallery, Anadol established himself as the AI-artist for lazy curators and collectors. His studio and production are ostensibly carbon-neutral, winning brownie points, and the images used for training this AI-work are taken by his studio staff, which avoids the ethical and legal challenges of authorship so prevalent in AI – but we are talking about the bare minimum for someone with his resources. Being successful implies responsibility, also when it comes to sustainability. Glacier Dreams combines the worst of AI-slop and eco art. The Kunsthaus Zürich claims that the work is intended to ‘raise awareness’ in the face of disappearing glaciers. But how much awareness do we need to save them? Despite all the fanfare and spectacle around the piece, the installation is quite underwhelming: a black cube of equipment held together by stage scaffolding. A kind guard controls the influx of visitors through the modest entrance and reminds everybody to wear slippers. The mirrored floor and ceiling extend the images and visitor into an infinite mise en abyme: across four walls Anadol exposes visitors to a nauseating loop of AI-pixel cascades, a blown-up iPhone-photo app scrolls through a databank full of glacier photography and nauseating merging images of glaciers. It’s a lot. But that’s it, too. It’s just a bunch of images thrown into an AI meat grinder with a spectacular yet disappointing outcome, which has become characteristic for AI art.

It appears that the work is not intended to raise awareness of the disappearance of glaciers and the catastrophic effects of global warming on human life. Why else does Anadol decline to address or represent the human causes of climate change or the adverse effects it has on communities around the globe? Glacier Dreams is simply a finger pointing towards the obvious: glaciers are disappearing. But it suddenly makes more sense when the disappearance is understood as a transformation: there is no judgement or space for a critical perspective, transformation just is, and we ought to embrace it. It is another marketing stunt to make the collective force-feeding of AI more palatable: the disappearing glaciers are represented as a fact of nature, free from human intervention. And AI is represented simultaneously as a product of nature, the result of natural processes that could not be stopped by human agency: the transformative potential of AI is equated with the transformation of glaciers through their disappearance. Facts to be accepted. How naïve it would be to think both climate change and the development of AI could be the result of environmental and economic policy! And who could benefit from the naturalization of climate change and tech development? Surely not the tech libertarians, nor the fossil fuel industry, both of which are well known for dealing responsibly with their products and their environmental and social impact. Honi soit qui mal y pense!

So Anadol finally made us aware that glaciers are disappearing and we are expected to thank him for that. But now what? The installation is somehow immersive but no more so than any other combination of moving image and mirrors at a second-tier fun park. It does not offer a vision of a world with an intact ecosystem, free from anthropogenic climate change and without glacier loss. It does not invite visitors to rethink the impact of their lifestyle on the climate. And nothing in the installation reveals the necessity or benefit of AI. It is just another anecdote to be told over cocktails. Immersion was done better at Kunsthaus Zürich years before with Olafur Elliason’s Symbiotic Seeing, 2020, in which all the senses were addressed and the very presence of your own body influenced the installation by changing the flow of the fog, all without AI. If someone told you Anadol’s work had been produced exclusively with traditional software, you would believe it: for art, AI remains superfluous.

Of course, visitors are impressed by it and why not? Images are a powerful tool and there is nothing wrong with their simple consumption as entertainment. Most visitors walk in with their phones in hand, ready to take selfies and photos of each other within the spectacle of colours. But nobody will take action or recognise their own role within climate change by visiting Anadol’s installation. The piece is a gift from Julius Bär to Kunsthaus Zürich and part of the bank’s NEXT initiative to ‘encourage the interdisciplinary exploration of megatrends across the arts, science and technology.’ The Kunsthaus claims that the work visualises the ‘fragility of glaciers’, amongst other things. The idea that Anadol’s piece really does that is a colossal stretch to say the least. It neither develops an appealing aesthetic argument for AI, nor does it represent the human causes and dangers of glacier loss. Glacier Dreams is a celebration of the status quo, of change as simply natural transformation, of acceptance that both climate change and AI are natural and unstoppable. It is petrol-realism, the full acceptance of lost climate agency. It is our unshackling from the chains of imagining alternative worlds. And it is precisely not what eco art and eco exhibitions should be doing: Glacier Dreams won’t save us. What Julius Bär commissioned is effectively nothing more than a very expensive selfie backdrop for a burning world.

Refik Anadol, Glacier Dreams, Kunsthaus Zürich, till at least mid-2026