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. Like the fantastic visions of the original, Portent’s tableaux slip toward the uncanny, suggesting an anxious molting of nature—the instability of change into a new and unknowable state of being.

Created against our present-day backdrop of extreme weather, political upheaval, and the lingering disorientation of the pandemic, Portent channels a heightened awareness of our entanglement with a rapidly changing planet. In the delicate tremor of leaves and grasses, Marcuse conveys a sense of awe shot through with foreboding—a recognition that the fragile systems sustaining us are as uncertain as they are wondrous.