Not a day goes by without the Dutch talking about the weather, especially after recent floods and months of record-breaking temperatures. Just the other day, hailstones the size of fists hammered down on a district near Eindhoven.

Perhaps the weather gods were making mischief with , an exhibition at the city’s MU gallery. Its curator Hanneke Wetzer wants to explore our experience of the elements, and ask ourselves how we marry that with what we know (or at any rate believe) about our changing climate.

The exhibition space is dominated by a tornado. The fans powering Alistair McClymont’s give the space its own weather system, breezily animating the works hanging nearby. It’s not all clouds, wind and rain, however: Spectrum MU by projects a rainbow across the Klokgebouw concert hall, opposite the exhibition space (pictured above), while indoors, visitors lie back and relax, watching clouds drift through glass spheres in , before venturing through the plywood spiral entrance to experience the Mediterranean sun in ‘s installation built around a . The illusion is uncanny, and the irony of having to enter a room inside a room to see some decent “sunshine” is lost on no one.

So much for works that seek to investigate their subjects through capture or simulation. They elicit the sensation that the laws of nature have been suspended, and I can’t shake the feeling that when it comes to our changing climate, they offer a dangerous, false sense of control.

A larger group of works respond to the weather, in a more or less detached fashion. There’s typographic work by , which reveals itself only in the rain. Aernoudt Jacobs’s turns sunlight into sound. Other pieces take external weather conditions as their input and turn them into abstract forms. Weather, Feathers & Frost by is a sort of visual weather station: inside his “weather glasses”, downy feathers float on local air currents, and a drop in temperature will cause crystals to form. Ik ga weermuziek maken, a charmingly lo-fi harpsichord-like weather station by , turns the surrounding weather into music, while David Bowen’s adds an element of distance: its 42 dried plant stalks rattle with the force and direction of real-time winds being recorded in Wisconsin. The geographical displacement here introduces a much-needed sense of global interconnectedness.

Gideon Mendel’s stands alone in explicitly dealing with the human consequences of extreme weather. He has documented the conditions in communities across the globe following severe floods. The scenes are human and familiar. Living conditions in different parts of the world may differ, but a water-damaged family photo is the same across the globe.

“Surrounded by all this curious, ingenious and often quite beautiful artwork, I found myself hyperventilating”

Weather or Not is both delightful and fascinating, but in addressing the scale, complexity and utmost urgency of global anthropogenic climate change, it could have kicked up more of a storm. “We seem to respond to climate change with pragmatism rather than panic,” says the exhibition’s blurb.

Surrounded by all this curious, ingenious and often quite beautiful artwork, I found myself hyperventilating. Even catastrophic events aren’t changing people’s attitudes towards climate change. A 2 °C rise in average global temperatures is inevitable, and the future is likely to be bleak. Awe and wonder are all very well. But don’t let anyone tell you that panic is an inappropriate response.

[exhibition_info title=”Weather or Not” gallery=”MU artspace” gallery_link=”http://www.mu.nl/en” location=”Eindhoven, the Netherlands” fromdate=”now” todate=”25 September 2016″]

Fungi are ubiquitous, but they often go unnoticed. When we do register their impact on our lives, we often associate them with disease, or. Their primary function, from our point of view, is to break down organic wastes, and maintain the flow of nutrients through our ecosystem. This renders them subtly, or sometimes not-so-subtly, unlikeable.

Spare a thought, then, for microbiologist Han Wösten of Utrecht University and Maurizio Montalti of Amsterdam-based design studio. They have curated Fungal Futures, an exhibition which seeks to expand our relationships with these organisms by presenting innovative uses of fungal threads – mycelium.

Wösten and Montalti invited artists and to imagine new products, using a palette of recently developed fungal materials. Their designs are supposed to suggest an eco-friendly and self-sustaining future in which petroleum products – especially plastics – have largely been replaced, and organic wastes optimally recycled. The results are impressive, but mixed. How you perceive them depends to a surprising extent on the way in which the show’s layout speaks to your assumptions and prejudices.

Whether a fungal future fascinates or repulses you, it is undeniably a relief to visit an exhibition not held inside the sterile white box of a contemporary gallery. Spring sun pours in through the roof of the old greenhouses of the University Museum in Utrecht, and with the window vents open, a light breeze fills the space with the smells of earth and figs. The restored iron and wood frames of the buildings and their resident plants provide a suitably textured background for work that invites you to imagine a more organic future.

The works themselves however, are displayed within sealed glass cases. One assumes – perhaps quite wrongly – that these exhibits are fragile and need to be quarantined from the real world, each in its own sterile mini-gallery. This is a bit of a problem in an exhibition that wants to highlight all the areas where mycelium products might make their mark, from the built environment to food.

, for example, is a new building material. The binding properties of mycelium allow it to fuse and form durable bonds with other organic materials. These blocks, then, could potentially transform our built environment. Still, you can’t help asking how they can possibly stand up to a world battered by climate change if they can’t survive being exposed in a greenhouse.

The glass cases offer a more natural home to the Growing Shoes project (pictured above) and dress. We’re used to future-oriented shows displaying these kinds of objects – invariably 3D-printed and so relying on oil-intensive resources and supply chains. The fungal alternatives displayed here are altogether greener. Wonderfully, they are actually intended to decay – as eloquent a commentary on the vagaries of fashion as any artist could contrive.

When we get to food production, an area where mycelium shows a lot of promise, the glass casing comes across as reassuringly hygienic. Here the talking point is , a project to grow edible fungi on a base of waste plastic (see image below). Might we one day eat our way out of our pollution predicament? It’s a half off-putting, half-mouthwatering prospect.

We are far from identifying all the types of fungi with which we co-exist. And we are still discovering the unexpected role they can play in natural systems – together with other microorganisms, fungi could affect the formation of clouds, for example. Genetic engineering of fungi is opening up yet more material possibilities.

In the near future, however, it is likely to be the utilitarian properties of new mycelium materials that win us over. Already fungal products are making inroads in packaging and insulation, providing throwaway products we surely no longer want to make from plastic.

Fungal Futures provides glimpses of futures that will not, to be honest, prompt many launch parties. These are futures that, true to their nature, will grow unseen until their fruiting bodies break ground. The fungal takeover may be a slow one, but, on the evidence of this show, it is one we can unreservedly welcome.

Read more: The world’s first compostable drone

[exhibition_info title=”Fungal Futures: Growing domestic bio-landscapes” title_link=”http://www.fungal-futures.com/” gallery=”University Museum Utrecht” gallery_link=”http://www.universiteitsmuseum.nl/english” location=”the Netherlands” fromdate=”now” todate=”16 May”]