Pia Rönicke studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen (1995-2001) and at the California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles (1999-2001). Her practice takes shape across various media (installation, photography, text, drawing, engraving, sculpture, etc.), among which film plays an important role. Thematically, her work deals primarily with the relationship of nature to humanity and history, as well as with women artists, after whom P. Rönicke traces the tenuous strands of memory that survive. These two apparently disparate fields within her work are united through the importance that she accords to the encounter, be it with individuals or with objects, as a creative catalyst. In some cases, discoveries spark dialogues built around a common interest; other encounters occur across time, as subtle resonances intertwine the past and the contemporary. For P. Rönicke, archives and readings are often at the origin of works that will unfold as research or exploration. Her thinking begins with and centres around the documents and people to whom she devotes herself. Because of this, her practice often involves the creation of a context at once historic, formal and sensory. Her works materialise the space that exists around the objects that are their points of departure, objects whose effects she tracks, be they on people, theories, politics or ecosystems.

In Rosa’s Letters (2006), the artist takes a selection of Rosa Luxemburg’s letters as an anchorage point for a panoramic survey that extends across the space of a multimodal installation. A 44-minute film in which extracts of the militant revolutionary’s correspondence is read aloud over a backdrop of anodyne images is coupled with a second, 30-minute film documenting the places where she wrote, along with a model of P. Rönicke’s apartment, where a miniature exhibition of documents and slides relating to Rosa Luxemburg was on display. In 2012 the publication of a book (Rosa’s Letters, Mousse Publishing) represented a further development in the work, which occurs across space and time.

P. Rönicke pays attention to scale, spatial, semantic and historical, and we see this elsewhere in her work on botanical collections. A plant pressed by a 19th-century Danish botanist is the starting point for works The Cloud Document (2017) and Word for Forest (2018), in which she exposes the geographic, climatic, geopolitical, colonial and scientific realities that traverse a herbarium conserved in Copenhagen. Her research and the partnerships that nourish it lead her to discover the places and objects in which these plural realities intermingle. For instance, she might reconstruct the journey of a seed preserved in the Copenhagen botanical gardens back to the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico, from where it was removed in the 19th century. In Word for Forest, the film she subsequently created, ecosystems succeed one other, revealing the reality of an uprooting with repercussions that reverberate beyond the environmental.

P. Rönicke has participated in a number of group exhibitions, such as Art and Life in the Critical Zone (Kin Museum of Contemporary Art, Kiruna, Sweden, 2024), Chaleur humaine (Triennale Art Industrie, Dunkerque, France, 2023), On the Rising Wave (Busan Biennale, Korea, 2022), Become Flower (MAMAC, Nice, France, 2022), and Elephant Cemetery (Artists Space, New York, GNS, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2003). Her solo shows notably include Drifting Woods (Gävle Art Center, Sweden, 2021), Word for Forest (Parallel Oaxaca, Mexico, 2018), The Cloud Document (O-Overgaden Copenhagen, 2017), The Pages of Day and Night (gb agency, Paris, 2015) and Aurora (Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico, 2012). Her work can be found in various major collections, including, in France, at the Centre national des arts plastiques (Cnap) and the Frac Alsace, in Sweden at the Moderna Museet, and in Denmark at the Danish Art Foundation.