Now in Tschumi Pavilion: ‘Shifting Ground’ | Nina van Tuikwerd
About this activity.
This fall, you can see Shifting Ground by Nina van Tuikwerd at the Tschumi Pavilion: a poetic video work reflecting on how we have forgotten what nature once looked like.
🍾 The opening is on Thursday, November 13, from 5:00 p.m. – everyone is welcome!
About Shifting Ground
We forget how rich nature once was. What was once normal slowly fades from our collective memory. Shifting Ground sheds light on the Shifting Baseline Syndrome: the gradual shift of our reference points, causing each generation to perceive an increasingly impoverished nature as ‘normal.’ Because this change happens so gradually, we hardly notice it.
The 27-minute video sculpture Shifting Ground was specially developed for the Tschumi Pavilion. More than a video work, it is a spatial installation that surrounds the viewer with slowly changing landscapes. The landscape depicted is a fictional memory of Groningen, composed of native species such as crested hairgrass, northern sedge, purple coneflower, corn lily, round wintergreen, and bramble. Together, they form a constructed imagination—similar to the flower still lifes of Jacob Vosmaer, where flowers that never bloomed at the same time were combined into a timeless whole.
The work makes the almost invisible tangible. A poetic translation of loss, it invites passersby to pause and reflect on what is changing before it disappears from our collective memory forever.
About Nina van Tuikwerd
Nina van Tuikwerd is a designer and visual artist who not only investigates the ecological crisis but also visualizes it. Her work stems from a deep awareness of the deteriorating relationship between humans and nature. Without a fixed medium but with a clear message, she creates new narratives in which the Earth is not passive but an autonomous force. She uses fiction, imagery, and science to reveal what is at stake and what can still be saved. Her worlds are as magical as they are confronting, prompting a reconsideration of our human presence on this planet. Nina graduated with honors from KABK (2019) and completed the master’s program F for Fact at the Sandberg Institute in 2024.
AI specialist Arran Lyon on Shifting Ground
Arran Lyon is the AI specialist Nina frequently collaborates with. Arran translates Nina's ideas into a model. Below, he explains how he did this for Shifting Ground:
“Through a custom AI video pipeline, I am building a system that visualises the shifting scenery of Groningen as an environment in flux by generating a speculative landscape that invokes the feeling of change and loss. Utilising my experience and knowledge of the latest cutting edge AI techniques, I will develop a bespoke system that learns to generate the flowers, trees and fauna of Groningen from processing a curated dataset of images and descriptions. With these models in hand, another series of operations will enable us to direct and compose the outputs together to form the final landscape video through prompting and guidance methods.The system therefore becomes both a creative and analytical tool, allowing us to iteratively refine the narrative and experiment with temporal and visual dynamics to carry the emotional imprint of the of a region in transition.”
Kunstpunt Groningen.
Kunstpunt Groningen (voorheen CBK) is hét knooppunt voor beeldende kunst. Wij lenen kunstwerken uit, begeleiden kunstopdrachten in de openbare ruimte en bij bedrijven, ontwikkelen educatieprojecten voor scholen en organiseren tentoonstellingen en activiteiten.
Kunstpunt Groningen (formerly CBK) is the hub for visual arts. We lend works of art, supervise art assignments in public spaces and at companies, develop educational projects for schools and organize exhibitions and activities.
Location.
Tschumipaviloen (Kunstpunt)
Hereplein
9711 HN Groningen
tel (050) 317 17 07
www.kunstpuntgroningen.nl