Rikke Luther
Here’s … Mud In Your Eye
Here’s … Mud In Your Eye (2026).
Audio-visual work (42 minutes).
Mud in Your Eye in terms of law and aesthetics
Here’s ... Mud in Your Eye explores the world’s greatest market and legal regulatory failure. That systemic failure of legal systems and economic models to address the planetary context rests on abstraction - a hermetic view of human laws and norms, which are conceived with little or no regard for the biological realities sustain life.
Luther’s film uses conventions of western aesthetics and documentary film making to frame the problem of social and legal-conceptual limits for an increasingly digitally-distracted audience with little or no understanding of planetary realities that are rapidly re-writing the contexts of social action. When once stable muds - the very stuff of the Earth - are on the move, the cultures built on top cannot remain unaltered.
Here’s ... Mud in Your Eye is one of a number of recent works by Luther made in relation to the research outputs of Copenhagen University’s Institute Research Centre on Ocean Climate, and Society in Denmark and Iceland.
Introduction to the film: Mud is the blood of the Earth
Landscapes buckle. Mountains dissolve. In the Arctic, water courses brown with exotic muds, fixed for millennia in permafrost, dissolve into plumes of sediment, spreading far out in the ocean.
Boundaries are broached, leaving concepts in tatters. Geological and biological changes are happening at human speed now. Distracted by dustless interfaces that deliver an intoxicated world, we are ‘entering the realm of the unwell’.
In October 2025, the UN General Secretary António Guterres announced the 1.5°C heating limit had been officially broached. Maps are becoming useless. Fixed geography is beginning to syncopate with human speeds. Data decay is frantic. The past is no longer any guide.
Here's... Mud In Your Eye follows the discourse of human hands as science struggles to move as fast as the data on which models are built. Humans are no measure of geo-ecological reality, but all we know comes through our fingers. The fast changes in muds demonstrate that external stresses, such as thawing and cooling, are unpredictable effects with profound impacts on cultivation, the very basis of culture. The North Atlantic seabed is an organic library that records millennia of planetary development. Micro-life vital to planetary health, e-DNA from the deep past, vies with growing fear of changes in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) that informs the hands working on board ship: launching and landing equipment, handwritten notes and debates are revealed as the structuring necessities of knowledge.
Mud In Your Eye follows the fragility of human understanding in development. A story of mud and sediments that moves between Denmark, Greenland, Iceland and the only part of the world’s oceans actually cooling in the North Atlantic. The film was developed through conservations with senior scientists at the Research Centre on Ocean Climate and Society (ROCS) and The Globe Institute at Copenhagen University (KU).
Mud In Your Eye is the partner film to Dust & Flow, which premiered at CPH:DOX in 2024. Both films engage visually with the fast-mutating landscapes using narrative structures that stretch the objective ‘documentary form’ to allow the interior dialogue of the author to voice their reactions to the material recounted. The script is voiced by actor David Bateson, who performs the roles of the narrator, Luther’s inner dialogue, and additional characters. The film was completed in 2026 and exhibited at Luther’s solo exhibition Here’s Mud In Your Eye at Kunsthal Aarhus, Denmark, 2026.
