“When I grow up, I want to be a paleo-artist and paint dinosaurs.”“I want to be a florist.” “I’m looking forward to the future because I’ll be taller and can reach more things in the cupboard.” These are some of the comments made by the six- and seven-year-olds in artist Cornelia Parker’s film The Future (Sixes and Sevens), 2023, which is on display at the Hayward Gallery’s “Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis”.
Asked about their individual and collective futures, the children in Parker’s film respond with optimistic zeal, while demonstrating an impressive grasp of the issues plaguing the planet. One boy – who suggested his ambition was to work on “quantum gravity” – thinks we should get scientists to make more icebergs so we can “stick them on the melting ones”. Another thinks we should “just stop” – no doubt he’ll grow up to be a degrowther.
Dear Earth makes the case that climate art is a distinct genre of contemporary art with its own set of concerns. This idea builds on similar exhibitions such as the Barbican’s “Our Time on Earth” (2022), and solo projects by artists including Olafur Eliasson, Richard Mosse, Edward Burtynsky and Precious Okoyomon. Rather than coolly reflecting on the environment from a distance, climate art is bound up with “the unique and evolving role art has to play in today’s climate crisis,” to quote Dear Earth. The exhibition text concludes with the suggestion the exhibition allows audiences to “engage with the way that care for our planet is embedded in political, spiritual and environmental actions. This is an exhibition that aims not to breed despair, but spark active and imaginative responses.”
We need to foreground the image-makers who are helping us understand how the world is changing
I don’t think I’m alone in finding this idea difficult to understand: what does such a response actually look like? And by implication, how this art is supposed to operate? Is education its aim, leaving us better informed? Or does it want to galvanise action through terrifying, sublime images? Maybe these works strive to heal us, so we leave the gallery with greater empathy for the planet and each other. Whichever one it is, there’s undoubtedly an added ethical imperative and greater urgency to climate art than other forms of contemporary art: we expect more of it and – crucially – it expects more of us.
Dear Earth’s first answer to these questions is that we should endeavour to find joy and beauty amidst the ruins. The following words from writer Robin Wall Kimmerer fill a wall halfway around the exhibition: “Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.”
Such moments of wonder materialise regularly throughout the exhibition. British duo Ackroyd & Harvey’s “photographic photosynthesis works” are portraits of climate activists grown from grass seed by projecting photographic negatives precisely onto their living canvases, so the grasses in darker areas have less chlorophyll than those exposed to more light. They are at once man and nature, and pleasingly soft in their focus and texture.
Next door, German artist Hito Steyerl removes humans from her installation, Green Screen, which explores her interest in what plants have to say. On the back of a giant LED screen, Steyerl has grown a vertical fernery lit by purple lights. The ferns generate bioelectrical signals, which are translated into sounds that have been paired with a mesmeric drum track. These sounds are then fed into an AI engine that turns them into pixelated, morphing animations of flowers. Made with the help of Berlin’s sustainable hacker collective, c-Base, I sat there pondering a future where computers and plants peacefully commune.
Most of the exhibits in Dear Earth aim to go farther than imparting wonder, however. Artists such as Imani Jacqueline Brown, Himali Singh Soin and Otobong Nkanga and Richard Mosse present works that are the result of a sustained research practice into issues from resource extraction to Victorian fears about a deadly ice age. Imani Jacqueline Brown’s What remains at the end of the earth (2022) typically aims to educate viewers on the devastating effect of fossil fuel infrastructure in Louisiana’s wetlands, and the industry’s foundations in settler colonialism and slavery. We look first at an annotated map of oil wells, before moving to an animation showing the canals slashed through the delicate, brackish, wetland habitat, finally ending with a video uncovering enslaved peoples’ burial grounds.
Such research-heavy works are by now familiar in contemporary group shows, especially in climate-art exhibitions. We leave better informed, but since most museumgoers aren’t policy- or law-makers that can end specific wrongdoings, is this enough to make a difference? Given most climate-art visitors are already convinced of the climate crisis, wouldn’t it be better to focus on works that foster hope? Or those that move us emotionally, to the point we want to take action – like Cornelia Parker’s deceptively simple film? That particular work left me in no doubt as to the next generation’s gumption, but also keen to do something myself, before they take the reins.
Rebecca Solnit captures this sentiment in her catalogue note, where she observes that climate discourse has hitherto been centred on austerity and the renouncing of pleasure. “[O]ne of the jobs that art can do is help us to see that it is in the less commodifiable aspect of our lives that another kind of wealth or poverty lies,” she writes. “These are the aspects of social connection and connection to the natural world; of love and friendship; of quality of life as time, and meaningful work and pleasure; as joy; of confidence in society and in the future; of hope.”
Beyond Dear Earth, the two artworks that have, for me, best communicated Solnit’s idea of a different kind of wealth and connection are Richard Power’s epic 2018 novel The Overstory, and Nederlands Dans Theater’s (NDT) Figures in Extinction [1.0] (2022), which I saw at Sadler’s Wells earlier this year.
Power’s novel follows a disparate cast of contemporary Americans whose unique life experiences with trees bring them together to address the destruction of forests. It shows, beautifully, how we can find meaning in collaboration and action. NDT’s Figures in Extinction [1.0] is a haunting modern ballet imaginatively depicting a handful of extinct species like the poison tree frog or Pyrenean ibex. Its transformation of human bodies to exotic creatures connects us to these long-gone species, making us want to hold on to what we have left.
These are great examples of climate art because, like the children in the film, they make us think about the future, and at best they have the power to transform us into the people we need to be to respond to the climate crisis.
Max Lunn is a journalist based in London
