New Polar Aesthetics
Thursday, December 15
United States: 5pm PDT, 6pm MDT, 7pm CDT, 8pm EDT
Australia: 12:00 AEDT Friday
Lisa Bloom with El Glasberg
In Bloom's new book Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics, she considers the way artists, filmmakers, and activists in the Arctic and Antarctic 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 Uulien, Zacharia 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.
This is a book launch event! You can purchase Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics in the ecoartspace store, here. Members receive a 30% discount!
Lisa E. Bloom is the author of many feminist books and articles in art history, visual culture, and cultural studies including her book Gender on Ice: American Ideologies of Polar Expeditions (University of Minnesota Press, 1993), the first critical feminist and postcolonial cultural studies book on the polar region, and her anthology With Other Eyes: Looking at Race and Gender in Visual Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 1999) that demonstrates that feminist, postcolonial and antiracist concerns can be incorporated into the history of art. She is currently in residence at the Beatrice Bain Center in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her latest book, Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics: Artists Reimagine the Arctic and Antarctic (Duke University Press, 2022), that is the subject of my talk texamines aspects of feminist and environmentalist art that conjoins issues routinely kept apart in climate change debates such as the fate of indigenous communities, resurgent nationalisms, globalizing capitalism as well as questions of gender, race, and persistent postcolonial relations. She has taught and had been a researcher at numerous universities and art schools over the years including the University of California, Berkeley, (2018-2022) where she is a scholar-in-residence at the Beatrice Bain Center in the Department of Gender and Women's Studies. www.lisaebloom.com
Bloom will be joined by El Glasberg the writer of Chapters 4 and 5 of her book.
El Glasberg, author of Antarctica As Cultural Critique: The Gendered Politics of Scientific Exploration and Climate Change (Palgrave 2012), writes about American cultural imaginaries shaping up in wind, water, and dirt. Glasberg teaches writing for the arts at New York University. Their new book project is Swamp Songs: Bob Dylan’s Big Muddy.
Members and one guest are free. General Public can attend for $10. All participants MUST REGISTER.
