Artist of the week 168: Svein Flygari Johansen

Svein Flygari Johansen is a modern-day Romantic. While his hero Caspar David Friedrich captured the mysteries of mountains and forests in paint, Johansen uses the latest technology for his ecologically minded projects. In his UK debut, Am I Making Up What Really Happened?, the fusions of art, nature and science (created with his technical collaborator, Jonny Bradley) include a giant plastic sack of fish-free Thames river water suspended from the ceiling in a low-lit, cave-like gallery. Beneath it, the twitching shadow of a trout swims across the floor as a digital projection. The effect is magical, like seeing a ghost.

Though now based in Oslo, Johansen was born and raised in Alta, the northern-most city in the world, and the raw Nordic fjords and forests are at the heart of his work. As a boy, he campaigned against the Norwegian government's controversial plans to build a power station and dam on the local Alta-Kautokeino river. It proved a formative experience, focusing his attention on conservation and the age-old culture of Norway's indigenous Sami, whose land rights were thrown into question by the government proposals.

The conflict between old and new ways of life is brought into focus in works such as the photo diptych The Fence (2007). In one image where fresh grasslands are lit up by a blue summer sky, a rickety wooden Sami reindeer fence winds. In the other, it's winter, the landscape muddy and sliced in two by an industrial white metal fence, heralding the privatisation of ancient common land on the borders of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia.

A similar tension is at play in the shimmering limestone humps that spread across the floor in his current show like a scaled-down Nordic landscape. Yet this panoramic vision of untouched natural beauty palls somewhat when you discover the sparkle is thanks to a crystal coating of ammonium sulphate, a chemical more commonly used in industrial fertiliser and related to the nitrate used in explosives.

There's a sleight of hand, now you see it now you don't, quality to Johansen's work. He points to what is lost in a changing world, where ancient ways and eco-systems succumb to the rapid march of global capitalism.