Full Description
In Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics, Lisa E. Bloom considers the ways artists, filmmakers, and activists engaged with the Arctic and Antarctic to represent our current environmental crises and reconstruct public understandings of them. Bloom engages feminist, Black, Indigenous, and non-Western perspectives to address the exigencies of the experience of the Anthropocene and its attendant ecosystem failures, rising sea levels, and climate-led migrations. As opposed to mainstream media depictions of climate change that feature apocalyptic spectacles of distant melting ice and desperate polar bears, artists such as Katja Aglert, Subhankar Banerjee, Joyce Campbell, Judit Hersko, Roni Horn, Isaac Julien, Zacharias Kunuk, Connie Samaras, and activist art collectives take a more complex poetic and political approach. In their films and visual and conceptual art, these artists link climate change to its social roots in colonialism and capitalism while challenging the suppression of information about environmental destruction and critiquing Western art institutions for their complicity. Bloom's examination and contextualization of new polar aesthetics makes environmental degradation more legible while demonstrating that our own political agency is central to imagining and constructing a better world.
Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction. From the Heroic Sublime to Environments of Global Decline 1
I. Disappearing Landscapes: Feminist, Inuit, and Black Viewpoints
1. Antarctica and the Contemporary Sublime in Intersectional Feminist Art Practices 25
2. Reclaiming the Arctic through Feminist and Black Aesthetic Perspectives 54
3. At Memory's Edge: Collaborative Perspectives on Climate Trauma in Arctic Cinema 85
II. Archives of Knowledge and Loss
4. What is Unseen and Missing in the Circumpolar North: Contemporary Art and Indigenous Collaborative Approaches / Lisa E. Bloom and Elena Glasberg 105
5. Viewers as Citizen Scientists: Archiving Detritus / Lisa E. Bloom and Elena Glasberg 130
III. Climate Art and the Future of Art and Dissent
6. The Logic of Oil and Ice: Reimagining Documentary Cinema in the Capitalocene 153
7. Critical Polar Art Leads to Social Activism: Beyond the Disengaged Gaze 176
Epilogue. Seeing From the Future 195
Notes 201
Filmography 229
Bibliography 235
Index 253
