Art and Climate Change

An evening with authors Maja and Reuben Fowkes and artists Tuur van Balen, Sonia Levy and Himali Singh Soin.

Published by Thames & Hudson as part of the World of Art series, Art and Climate Change is dedicated to artistic engagements with intensifying ecological breakdown.

Authors Maja and Reuben Fowkes write, '...when the future of life on earth is threatened, creative production for its own sake is not enough. Artists are calling for an active, collective rapprochement with the planet and the uncovering of the exploitative structures that threaten the survival of people, animals, plants and natural entities. Exploring the meeting point of decolonial reparation and ecological restoration, artists are drawing on activist praxes, ecological theories, scientific insights and indigenous worldviews to engage with the climate crisis. The book examines art practices that respond to the Anthropocene and its detrimental impact on the planet’s climate, from scenes of nature decimated by ongoing extinction events and landscapes turned to waste by extraction, to art coming out of the communities most affected by the environmental injustice of climate change.'

This evening of discursive, sonic, visual and sensory interventions at The Showroom was an occasion to gather together around the uncertainties and urgencies of the age of climate chaos.

Artist Kasia Garapich has conceived an edible artwork, Planetary Ferment, for this special launch night. Made in collaboration with current BA Sculpture students at the Slade, Christine Chua, Scarlett Pochet and Luca Vincentelli.

Refreshments were kindly provided by the publishers Thames & Hudson.

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Biographies

Maja and Reuben Fowkes are founders of the Translocal Institute for Contemporary Art and directors of the Postsocialist Art Centre (PACT) at the Institute of Advanced Studies UCL. Their publications include Art and Climate Change (Thames & Hudson, 2022), Central and Eastern European Art Since 1950 (Thames & Hudson, 2020) and Ilona Németh: Eastern Sugar (Sternberg Press, 2021). Recent curatorial projects include the exhibitions Colliding Epistemes at Bozar Brussels (2022) and Potential Agrarianisms at Kunsthalle Bratislava (2021).

Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen work across objects, installation and film to explore processes of production as cultural, personal and political practices.

Kasia Garapich works across various media including sculpture, performative gestures and video, site specific installations and drawing.

Sonia Levy's research-led practice considers shifting modes of engagement with other/more-than-human worlds in light of prevailing earthly precarity. Her work operates at the intersection of art and science, a co-becoming of practices tending to the reweaving of multispecies worlds.

Himali Singh Soin is a writer and artist based between London and Delhi. She uses metaphors from outer space and the natural environment to construct imaginary cosmologies of interferences, entanglements, deep voids, debris, delays, alienation, distance and intimacy. In doing this, she thinks through ecological loss, and the loss of home, seeking shelter somewhere in the radicality of love. Her speculations are performed in audio-visual, immersive environments.