What role for art in a climate emergency?
In December a wily new art organisation was launched titled Curious. Modest in size but ambitious in scope, Curious set out to bring intriguing people and events with a contemporary art focus to the Queenstown-Lakes region. They’re about to have their second free event and are welcoming Associate Professor Susan Ballard from Victoria University of Wellington to Queenstown on Saturday 22 April.
The large-scale earthworks of American Robert Smithson were a turning point for 1960s art. His performative Asphalt Rundown saw a truckload of asphalt dumped down the hillside of a quarry in Rome. Such art works were not only a challenge to art history but to history itself, art that examined time as a prehistoric geological past as well as an obsolescent post-human future. Some 50 years later Alicia Frankovich’s live performative AQI2020 was staged over two-weeks at Auckland Art Gallery where performers moved in choreographed gestures within a smokey, large orange enclosure. Her installation reflected on conditions experienced during the previous Australian bush fire season which had an unprecedented effect on people, wildlife and land, emitting dangerous levels of smoke across Australia and also seen from New Zealand.
As the realities of climate change impact Aotearoa New Zealand and the rest of the world, it has become clear that art is an increasingly present and powerful way of developing meaningful connection with urgent societal issues. Join Curious and Sue Ballard to explore how artists are challenging inaction as well as fixed concepts of nature in a talk that explores how art helps us think about our place in the world in the context of climate change.
Susan Ballard is an Associate Professor of Art History at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington where she teaches courses on art writing and the environment. Her book Art and Nature in the Anthropocene: Planetary Aesthetics was awarded the best book in the AAANZ Arts Writing and Publishing Awards 2022.
This event is presented by Curious at Starkwhite with support from Te Hau Toka Southern Lakes Wellbeing Group. Follow @curious_nz on instagram to hear about upcoming events.
4pm, Saturday 22 April 2023
at Starkwhite Queenstown, 1–7 Earl Street
