Flood Tide of Resistance Seminar
https://www.neme.org/blog/flood-tide-seminar
NeMe and curator Oliver Ressler are pleased to invite you to the seminar Flood Tide of Resistance on Saturday, 8 October 2022, 6:30pm. The seminar will bring together art workers talking about their practices in the overlapping fields of arts, ecology, politics and activism.
Flood Tide of Resistance
Curator, artist, and filmmaker Oliver Ressler will introduce the exhibition Flood Tide of Resistance that brings together artists who produce their works in dialogue with the climate justice movements in which they consider themselves participants. He will discuss the wide range of strategies and approaches that can be observed, such as taking over responsibility for the visual appearance of movements, the creation of tactical tools, designing direct action or the creation of alliances with different groups or organisations.
Oliver Ressler produces installations, projects in public space, and films on economics, democracy, racism, climate breakdown, forms of resistance and social alternatives.
Playfully Protesting Climate Chaos
How can forms of creative play inform the desperate need for more effective political action to stop the threat of climate change? Through a series of projects that Noel Douglas has been involved in this presentation will address this question and show how disobedient play in the urban spaces we inhabit and the art institutions that reflect on the world around us can add to the collective pressure to create a world whose climate is compatible with life for ourselves and future generations.
Noel Douglas is an artist, designer and activist whose work across a range of media and different spaces has been aligned with movements against capitalism and for social justice for over two decades. noeldouglas.net
Fossil Experience
Curated by Lena Johanna Reisner and realised in a former water reservoir in Berlin in 2022, the exhibition Fossil Experience and its accompanying program addressed some of the widely divergent and in part violent realities generated by the use of fossil fuels. The notion of fossil experience pointed, on the one hand, to the experience of acceleration made possible by the widespread availability of cheap energy, particularly in the second half of the twentieth century. On the other hand, it referred to the traumas of extraction, exposure, and displacement, which threaten to further escalate as global heating progresses. In her curatorial talk, Lena Johanna Reisner will reflect upon the aesthetic and discursive ambitions of the project, which has brought together important voices from art, poetry, and activism both locally and internationally.
Lena Johanna Reisner is an inter-dependent curator and writer based in Berlin. Her research centers around matters of ecology and natureculture, the social structures that drive climate change, ecosystem degradation, and biodiversity loss, as well as environmental and climate justice as counter-movements to these crises. Past curatorial projects include Fossil Experience at Prater Galerie, Berlin (2022); Antje Majewksi & Paweł Freisler: Apple. An Introduction. (Over and over and once again) at Galerie im Turm, Berlin (2019); Capitalo, Chthulu, and a Much Hotter Compost Pile at Kunstraum Kreuzberg, Berlin (2018); and Creatures of the Mud at Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster (2016). www.lenareisner.com
Looking back, forwards: The (Im)Possibility of Narrating Sustainability
Following an autoethnographic approach, this presentation by Sophie Goltz will reflect on how to engage with narratives of “Sustainable Development,” especially since the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, through cultural production and aesthetic forms. Starting from climate activism (Berlin, 1997), across modalities of curatorial questioning (Wien/Berlin, 2007/8) and research interventions (Singapore/Manila, 2018/19), to artistic engagements with practices of shared worlding (Salzburg/Kassel, 2021/2), this movement suggests significant transformations within the discourse of contemporary art. While engaging a subjective shift in perspectives towards zones of climate survival typically associated with the ‘Global South,’ such a shift is, arguably, a delayed formation relative to both the acceleration of climate emergencies in recent years, which are currently manifest within post-industrial contexts as the militarisation of the fossil fuel crisis through the Ukraine war; as well as to the historical discourse of climate activism itself.
Sophie Goltz lives and works in Salzburg and Berlin as a curator, art educator, and writer. In 2020, she was appointed director of the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts. From 2017 to 2020, she taught as an Assistant Professor in the new Museum Studies and Curatorial Practice (MA) program at the School of Art, Design and Media at Nanyang Technological University Singapore. She served as Deputy Director of Research and Academic Education at NTU Center for Contemporary Art Singapore (NTU CCA Singapore). From 2013 to 2016, she was the Artistic Director of Stadtkuratorin Hamburg. From 2008 to 2017, she worked as a curator at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), where she also became the Head of Communications and Art Education until 2013. Most recently, Goltz published Culture City. Culture Scape. (co-authored with Ute Meta Bauer and Khim Ong, NUS Press, 2021) and Passages. Art in Public Space Hamburg since 1981 (forthcoming, Spector Books) reflects on her time as Artistic Director of Stadtkuratorin Hamburg.
Sponsors
Flood Tide of Resistance is supported by alphamega.
