Tanya Marcuse: Portent

Tanya Marcuse’s multichannel video Portent presents ominous scenes of the natural world: trees swaying in the wind, vapour rising from volcanic fumaroles, icy branches illuminated by flickering light, and other small disturbances that hint at forces beyond our understanding. The quiet is deliberate; the frame remains fixed while the environment shifts restlessly within it, evoking a tension between stillness and motion, beauty and unease, the known and unknown. Marcuse describes her work as an exploration of the kinship between disaster and the sublime, and of the ways the world around us is continually threatened, transformed, and made strange. Portent forms part of her expansive series Book of Miracles (2020-26), inspired by the Augsburger Wunderzeichenbuch, a 16th-century illuminated manuscript depicting natural disasters, supernatural phenomena, celestial spectacles and unexplained oddities.