Weather Spectre: From Magic to Geoengineering

Rita Süveges artist, winner of the 2023 TÓTalJOY Prize, has long been investigating the cultural, technological, and ethical aspects of the ecological crisis. 

In her exhibition she explores the lessons of previous endeavours to modify the weather and climate. Throughout history, humans have sought, by various means, to influence the weather in a favourable way. In the past, they turned to magic, witchcraft, or folk practices to ward off hail or drought. In the new worldview of modernity, the conquest of nature was the priority, giving rise to the scientific era of weather manipulation. 

Today, the local reality of recurring weather phenomena has been superseded by the threat of climate change. Weather and climate are in fact mutually exclusive notions: weather is the state of the atmosphere at a given place and time, while climate is the recurrence of weather conditions over a lengthier period of time. Can the lessons learnt in the struggle against weather be scaled up to the global processes currently affecting the planet? 

Süveges’s installation evokes the immaterial aesthetics of technological development, metallically glittering and invariably vanishing. Elevating our imagination to the level of the clouds, it gives flashes of insights into weather magic, the critiques of techno-optimism and the high stakes of geoengineering, doing so in red-glowing apparitions.

The TÓTalJOY Prize was established by the Museum of Fine Arts - Central European Research Institute for Art History (KEMKI) with the generous support of the artist Endre Tót. 

Curator: Brigitta Ádi

Hungarian National Gallery

On view from 4 October to 17 November 2024.