Anaïs Tondeur (born 1985, France) trained at Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art , London. Working at the intersection of art, science, ecological thinking and poetics, she has taken part in research and residencies that resonate with her inquiry into terrestrial materialities. These include: Artium, Vitoria, 2025; Spot Gallery, Terra dei Fuochi, 2024; National Museum of Natural History of Neuchâtel, 2023, and the former seed vault of the Vilmorin Family, 2020–21. Her fieldwork has extended through collaborations with the Musée des Arts et Métiers, CNES, 2019; Chaire Arts & Sciences, École Polytechnique, 2012-13, and a presence at the COP21 through a residency at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle and the Pierre and Marie Curie Institute, 2015.
Beginning in 2011, and ongoing, Tondeur's Chernobyl Herbarium project is a testimony to the nuclear disaster of 26 April 1986 when the core of a reactor at the Chernobyl power plant exploded, and radioactive particles, carried by the wind, contaminated much of Europe. Working with biogeneticists studying the impact of radioactivity on flora in the irradiated zones around the power plant, Tondeur has rendered visible the nuclear disaster by making direct prints of the radioactive plants on photosensitive sheets. Although the Chernobyl Herbariium series looks at the history of photography as well as the herbarium as a means of botanical classification, it is very much located in the present at a time when ecological disruption is endemic, and life persists in devastated landscapes.
In Le Trèfle, L'Abeille (2023-24), Anaïs Tondeur invites a shift in perception: an attempt to see the world through the vision of a bee. Inspired by Steraspis speciosa, a text by French author Pierre Bergounioux, this photographic series explores how bees, unlike humans, perceive light in the ultraviolet spectrum – ranging from green to ultraviolet, between 300 and 500 nanometres. In contrast, the human eye can only detect wavelengths from approximately 400 to 700 nanometres, making ultraviolet light invisible to us. In the darkroom, Tondeur exposed gathered plants to a Wood’s lamp (a type of ultraviolet UV light), which revealed a palette of colours usually hidden from human sight. Through this process, Tondeur’s images bring us closer to another way of seeing the world, one shaped by the perceptual experiences of beings other than ourselves.
Her series The Imprint of the Sky (2021) was inspired by her discovery of an engraving, which was published in Camille Flammarion’s L’Atmosphère: Météorologie Populaire (1888), found in the chapter “The Shape of the Sky.” Often referred to as “the engraving of the pilgrim,” it depicts a medieval traveller reaching the edge of the known world and passing beneath the sky’s surface, where earth and heavens are no longer sealed. “What is this blue,” Flammarion writes, “whose veil hides the stars from us during the day?” It is this speculative horizon Tondeur seeks to explore. Taken in remote areas of Ireland, Iceland, and the troposphere above the Bosphorus, Tondeur then manipulates each image in the darkroom. These photographs become embodiments of the diaphanous: thresholds where light, air, and matter dissolve into a space beyond time. Commissioned by the Jeu de Paume, the series was shown in French Photography Today: A New Vision of Reality at the Sungkok Art Museum, Seoul, in 2024.
'Sometimes, one has to begin by listening to the margins. Not the edges of discourses or maps, but those of the living: where the forest rustles, where bodies intertwine with breaths they cannot control. It is in these entanglements, from the Sumatran rainforest to the woodlands on the outskirts of Paris, that I began to learn how to see otherwise : to expose myself to what lingers. For, seeing is not enough. I am driven by the necessity of seeing with. I explore ways to perceive influenced by the perspectives of beings other than ourselves, or, in other words, to develop experiences as places of relation. In this sense, through my photographs I do not look for meaning to extract, but for relationships to cultivate. Beyond mere representation and documentation, the images are co-composed as sites of encounter, in an embodied engagement with the world.' – Anaïs Tondeur
Tondeur's work has been widely exhibited including Centre Pompidou and the MEP, Paris; MAMAC, Nice; Serpentine Gallery, London; French Pavilion Lieux Infinis at the Venice Architecture Biennale; Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo; Museum Ostwall, Dortmund; Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg; Kunst Haus, Vienna; Chicago Art Center: Spencer Art Museum, Kansas; Choi Center, Beijing; Nam June Paik Art Center, Sungkok Art Museum, Seoul.
