Diana Thater

For over two and a half decades, Diana Thater has explored the precarious relationship between culture and nature in her new media practice. Frequently using animals and natural phenomena as subjects, her precisely choreographed video installations immerse the viewer in ambient environments and invite new ways of seeing the world.

Drawing on issues of conservation, natural and manmade ecosystems, and socially-engineered environments, Thater’s installation and video work explores tensions between mankind and the animal kingdom, alongside the near-impossibility of unmanufactured experience. Animals feature as a recurring subject matter, yet when manipulated by Thater through video monitors and light-saturated environments, they attain a baroque artificiality heightened by the complete absence of sound.

Thater’s name has become associated with room-sized, profusely colorful and luminous projections which—as with her exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1998)—carry visitors off into another world. Her installations describe a technologically mediated nature while laying bare the mechanics of media representation, revealing the reality of the technical aspects and craftsmanship of the film.