Refik Anadol

In his spectacular piece ‘Glacier Dreams’ (2023), Refik Anadol (b. 1985 in Istanbul, lives in Los Angeles) uses AI to engage with one of the most pressing issues of our time – climate change. To make it, Refik Anadol used over 100 million images from online and institutional archives as well as an additional dataset which he put together himself, comprising more than 10 million visuals of glaciers from Iceland, Greenland and the Antarctic. Going beyond glacier research and aided by AI, Anadol creates poetic experiences with captivating images of glaciers that highlight their fragility.

At the Kunsthaus Zürich, this work is now being presented as an immersive installation that engages the entire body from all sides. Appealing to the faculties of sight, hearing and even smell, it invites visitors to reflect on the impact of melting glaciers with their senses, bodies and intellects. Anadol’s pixels recall the dabs of paint in the works of the Impressionist Claude Monet, whose vast, world-famous water-lily pictures – also on show at the Kunsthaus – anticipated immersive art in the medium of painting. Anadol has coined the term ‘data painting’ to describe this technique, whereby pictures no longer wait to dry, but instead take on ever-changing forms in a constant flow and thus question the idea of the artwork as a completed entity.

On view until at least end of January 2027