Amshu Chukki  - Tracing Light: After Albert Steiner

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This exhibition extends Amshu Chukki’s ongoing engagement with the landscapes of the Engadin Valley and their historical entanglement with the photographic practice of 20th-century Swiss landscape photographer Albert Steiner. Building upon his earlier body of video sculptures and viscosity etching prints that restaged and re-mapped Steiner’s photographic sites, Chukki now introduces a new constellation of works in drawing and sculpture that deepen his dialogue with the valley’s forms, textures, and temporal rhythms.

At the heart of this exhibition lies a series of silver and gold leaf drawings on paper—delicate renderings of the Engadin mountains recalled from memory. These drawings capture the ephemeral shimmer of sunlight striking snow, evoking fleeting moments of brilliance when the landscape itself seems to glow from within. The metallic surfaces of the drawings, shifting with the viewer’s movement, echo Steiner’s mastery of light in photography while reimagining it in a luminous, tactile register.

Alongside these works are brass casts of pine cones and fragments of pine bark gathered from the valley floor. Transformed into enduring metallic forms, these objects embody both fragility and permanence: natural matter solidified into monuments, carrying the imprint of the Engadin’s ecological textures across time. Together, the casts and drawings resonate with Chukki’s enduring concerns—landscape as stage, geological and historical time, memory and materiality—while extending them into new registers of light, shimmer, and permanence.

By tracing Steiner’s vision through re-staging, memory, and material transformation, Tracing Light: After Albert Steiner re-opens the question of how landscapes are seen, remembered, and re-imagined across generations.