Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics: Artists Reimagine the Arctic and Antarctic

Lisa E. Bloom's Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics explores how artists, filmmakers, and activists engage with the Arctic and Antarctic to represent environmental crises and reconstruct public understandings. She draws on feminist, Black, Indigenous, and non-Western perspectives to address the exigencies of the Anthropocene and its attendant ecosystem failures, rising sea levels, and climate-led migrations. Artists link climate change to its social roots in colonialism and capitalism, challenge the suppression of information about environmental destruction, and critique Western art institutions for their complicity. Bloom's examination and contextualization of new polar aesthetics make environmental degradation more legible and demonstrate that our own political agency is central to imagining and constructing a better world.

Format: Hardback
Length: 288 pages
Publication date: 11 November 2022
Publisher: Duke University Press

Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics by Lisa E. Bloom explores how artists, filmmakers, and activists have engaged with the Arctic and Antarctic to represent our current environmental crises and reconstruct public understandings of them. Bloom incorporates feminist, Black, Indigenous, and non-Western perspectives to address the exigencies of the Anthropocene and its attendant ecosystem failures, rising sea levels, and climate-led migrations. Unlike mainstream media depictions of climate change, which often 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.

Weight: 635g
Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781478015994