Panel discussion - Oliver Ressler: Barricading the Ice Sheets

Join us for this panel discussion on Thursday 20 April, where Oliver Ressler will be in conversation with artist and activist Noel Douglas, Dr Antigoni Memou, Art Historian and Senior Lecturer at the University of East London; and curator and writer Lena Reisner.

The public programme accompanying the exhibition aims to connect with key London-based voices including those active in the climate movement; as well as with activist networks contributing to public demonstrations in the city over the duration of the exhibition, and with local constituents in The Showroom neighbourhood.

Barricading the Ice Sheets is an exhibition by artist Oliver Ressler in the context of his eponymous research project focused on the climate justice movements. The exhibition incorporates a selection of new and existing works in a contextually calibrated presentation of the wider research that constitutes Barricading the Ice Sheets. For Ressler this research materialises as films, photographic works, a conference and publications which have been unfolding through an iterative, international cycle of exhibitions throughout 2021-23.

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Oliver Ressler is an artist and filmmaker who produces installations, projects in public space and films on issues encompassing economics, democracy, migration, the climate crisis, forms of resistance and social alternatives.

Noel Douglas is an artist, designer, educator and activist with a long history of working creatively using tactical media and art in the social and political movements for socialism, social justice and climate justice against capitalism. He has exhibited work on the streets and in galleries around the world, whether it’s producing art spectacles at summits against the likes of the G8 or COP or creating installations at the Taipei Biennial or showing work in group shows at V&A or Design Museum his aim is to hasten the transition to world where we can all live peace and in harmony with the biosphere. Alongside his own work he is interested in how people use Signs and Symbols to fight capitalism in social networks and collates Memes that do this.

Dr. Antigoni Memou (PhD, Courtauld Institute of Art, MA University of Southampton) is Senior Lecturer in Visual Theories and the Course Leader of the BA (Hons) Photography at the Department of Architecture and Visual Arts at the University of East London (U.K.). She has published in the journals Third Text, Philosophy of Photography, Photographies, Art and the Public Sphere and in edited collections. She is the author of Photography and Social Movements: From the Globalisation of the Movement (1968) to the Movement Against Globalisation (2001) (Manchester University Press, 2013) and co-author of Resist! The 1960s Protests, Photography and Visual Legacy, (Lannoo, 2018). Her research interests cut across themes in the areas of art and activism, the history and theory of photography, socially engaged artistic practices and critical issues of contemporary display.

Lena Johanna Reisner is an interdependent curator and writer based in Berlin. Her research centres around matters of ecology and natureculture, as well as environmental and climate justice. Focusing on questions of energy production, her most recent curatorial project 'Fossil Experience' (Prater Galerie, Berlin, 2022) addressed some of the widely divergent (and in part violent) realities generated by the use of fossil fuels. Following this, she received a grant from the Berlin Senate in 2022 for her research on nuclear legacies in visual culture and more-than-human landscapes. Funded by ifa's CrossCulture Program, Lena Johanna Reisner was a remote fellow at the Jakarta-based educational platform Gudskul in 2021, where she engaged in forms of collective learning. In 2019, she completed an ICI Curatorial Intensive in New Orleans and has been collaborating regularly with the Muthesius University of Fine Arts and Design in Kiel since 2020. Past curatorial projects include the thematic group show “Capitalo, Chthulu, and a Much Hotter Compost Pile” (Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin, 2018, together with Lorena Juan and Anaïs Senli) and “Creatures of the Mud” at Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster (2016). As a curator in Galerie im Turm (2017-2019), Berlin, she realized exhibitions with Antje Majewski, Naufus Ramírez Figueroa, Henrike Naumann, Omsk Social Club, Viviana Druga, and others.