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

Lisa E. Bloom's book "Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics" explores how artists, filmmakers, and activists represent the Arctic and Antarctic in order to reconstruct public understandings of the environmental crises caused by the Anthropocene. By engaging feminist, Black, Indigenous, and non-Western perspectives, Bloom highlights the complex poetic and political approach of artists who link climate change to social roots in colonialism and capitalism, challenge the suppression of information about environmental destruction, and critique Western art institutions for their complicity.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 288 pages
Publication date: 15 November 2022
Publisher: Duke University Press

Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics is a thought-provoking book by Lisa E. Bloom that delves into the ways artists, filmmakers, and activists have engaged with the Arctic and Antarctic to represent our current environmental crises and reconstruct public understandings of them. Bloom's work engages a diverse range of feminist, Black, Indigenous, and non-Western perspectives to address the urgent challenges posed by the Anthropocene, including the devastating effects of ecosystem failures, rising sea levels, and climate-led migrations.

In contrast to the mainstream media's portrayal of climate change, which often resorts to 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. Through their films, visual and conceptual art, these artists link climate change to its social roots in colonialism and capitalism, while also 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 make environmental degradation more legible, while also demonstrating that our own political agency is central to imagining and constructing a better world. By exploring the ways in which artists, filmmakers, and activists have engaged with the Arctic and Antarctic, Bloom offers a powerful lens through which to understand the complexities of our current environmental crisis and the urgent need for collective action.

Weight: 490g
Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781478023241