Barricading the Ice Sheets
An investigation by Oliver Ressler into the global climate justice movement
Image: Marcos Morilla
Barricading the Ice Sheets is an exhibition about global warming, the climate justice movements and its relationship to the arts.
From the first COP (United Nations Climate Change Conference) in Germany in 1995 to the last one this year in Egypt, 27 years have passed in which global carbon emissions have not been reduced at all. As a result, global temperatures continue to rise. This inaction on the part of nation states has led people to act on their own, without representation. Horizontally organised climate movements have sprung up all over the world. These collective action movements have carried out blockades of fossil fuel extraction industries and transport routes, organised mobilisations against airport expansions, conducted successful divestment campaigns and stopped drilling in the Arctic. Or, as we have seen very recently, they have carried out protest actions in front of works of art in Europe's most important museums.
The title Barricading the Ice Sheets refers to the scale of the emergency facing the climate justice movement and the scope of what it sets out to do. To barricade ice sheets as they melt is physically impossible, but the movement is attempting something historically unprecedented, because the planet has never in recorded human history confronted so absolute a threat. When Arctic ice melts, sea levels rise everywhere; islands and cities flood and sink, agriculture and fisheries falter and human life is compromised.
The exhibition Barricading the Ice Sheets presents films, photographic works and installations resulting from a decade of research by artist and filmmaker Oliver Ressler recording and documenting exemplary mobilisations, activities, assemblies and working meetings of climate movements around the world.
Dossier [+]
High quality photographs [+]
Programa de actividades (in Spanish) :
26 enero: Proyección The path is never the same en MUSOC
27 enero: Inauguración y conferencia del artista.
9 febrero: Conversación: No habrá arte en un planeta muerto.
25 febrero: Loading... Paraíso Natural y proyección del documental Rebellion.
16 marzo: Club de lectura: El libro del clima, creado por Greta Thunberg.
20 marzo: Leer la exposición: Barricadas de los hielos.
21 marzo: Taller: Habitar el mundo, poesía frente a la crisis climática, con Rosa Berbel.
6 mayo: Pedalea a la exposición - Barricadas en los hielos.
16 junio. Taller infantil Planeta B.
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Barricading the Ice Sheets is a research endeavor by Oliver Ressler, supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF: AR 526) and Camera Austria, Graz, the research institution where the first exhibition of the cycle appeared (04.09. – 21.11.2021). Further configurations of Barricading the Ice Sheets were solo exhibitions at Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb (30.11.2021 – 06.02.2022), Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), Berlin (04.06. – 31.07.2022) and Tallinn Art Hall, Tallinn (27.08. – 06.11.2022). In 2023, another iteration will take place as a solo exhibition at The Showroom, London (18.04. – 25.06.2023).
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