Artists and institutions seem content to merely ‘address’, ‘engage with’ or ‘respond to’ the climate crisis. It’s time for a concerted shift towards action
Exhibitions of art about ecology have been sprouting up everywhere, usually operating under some premise of ‘raising awareness’ for the climate crisis. The Hayward Gallery – with their ongoing exhibition, Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis – is just one recent example of many institutions, in London alone, that have rushed to stage ecocritical shows over the last few years: the Serpentine has an ongoing programme called General Ecology via which they stage related exhibitions like Back to Earth (2022); the Barbican Art Gallery’s Our Time on Earth (2022); various exhibitions at Tate, among them A Clearing in the Forest (2022); The Photographers’ Gallery’s When I image the earth, I imagine another (2021); Somerset House’s We Are History (2021); or the Royal Academy’s Eco-Visionaries (2019). Countless others have been staged around the world: a random sampling might include Simbiología: Prácticas Artísticas en un Planeta en Emergencia (Centro Cultural Kirchner, Buenos Aires, 2021); Adaptation: A Reconnected Earth (MCAD Manila, 2023); and Our Ecology (Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, autumn 2023). And that really is to name just a few. While these exhibitions do doubtlessly have the potential to inform ideological narratives surrounding the ecological crisis, they can so often feel futile in the face of real environmental devastation.
See the rest of the review at the link below
artreview.com/ecocritical-art-hayward-dear-earth-climate-crisis-exhibition/
