Ashes and Snow

Ashes and Snow by Canadian artist Gregory Colbert is an installation of photographic artworks, films, and a novel in letters that travels in the Nomadic Museum, a temporary structure built exclusively to house the exhibition.

Musical collaborators include: Patrick Cassidy, Michael Brook, David Darling, Heiner Goebbels, Lisa Gerrard, Lukas Foss, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Jóhann Jóhannsson and Djivan Gasparyan.

The first Nomadic Museum, designed by Japanese architect Shigeru Ban and engineers Buro Happold, debuted with the opening of Ashes and Snow in New York City in March 2005.

Colbert transformed the interior of the Arsenale using atmospheric elements including stone, curtains made from one-million pressed paper tea bags from Sri Lanka, and minimalist lighting techniques.

The interior architecture of the structure provided an ideal setting for Ashes and Snow: the monumental space gracefully accommodated Colbert’s large-format photographic artworks and films.

[4][5] Designed by Colombian architect Simón Vélez in collaboration with Colbert, the structure occupied 5,130-square meters (55,218 square feet) containing two galleries and three distinct theaters.

This architectural choice honored the symbolic significance of the Zócalo as the center of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, a city founded by the Aztecs on a small island in the middle of Lake Texcoco in 1325.

Colbert and Ban condition the senses of the visitors to facilitate their psychological entry into the space of the photographs, to deliver the message that man is not, and cannot be, separate from the nature within which he evolved... Ashes and Snow is a show that is disarmingly, and grandly, simple.

"[7] A Japanese edition of Newsweek praised the exhibition as "an expression of the poetic possibilities of a harmonious relationship between animals and man.”[8] In The Globe and Mail, Simon Houpt wrote that "Colbert’s work operates in a parallel universe to ours, an earnest, refreshing, post-ironic world where pure wonder and awe still reside.

"[12] Author and critic Amardeep Singh was "deeply annoyed by the strong current of exoticism and artificiality," finding fault with the "manipulative environment of the gallery," which "plays up a 'spiritual' and 'exotic' atmosphere that nullifies any objective quality the photographs themselves might have.