Artist Diana Thater has just arrived back from Kenya, where she documented the last three remaining northern white rhinos in the world as part of a project for Los Angeles’ non-profit Mistake Room.
Thater, currently subject of a retrospective at LACMA, works in film and creates works concerned with nature, our relationship with it, and how that changes over time. She is currently interested in the idea of the Anthropocene, which explores the impact that humans are having on the ecosystems and the geology of the Earth.
She had worked with animals in previous works, documenting tigers which had been trained to perform, dolphins, and also butterflies. Her work “Life is a time based Medium” was about the Galtaji Temple (or “Monkey Temple”) near Jaipur in India, where monkeys have free reign.
But after Thater completed her project “Chernobyl”—which centered on Przewalski’s horses, the last wild horses on Earth, and which was shown at Hauser & Wirth London in 2011—she found herself thinking increasingly about endangered species.