The Division of the Earth - Visual Theses on Climate Change in the Arctic. A student project on artistic research, the construction of images and their relationship to science.
Exhibitors: Tony Bartos, Maximilian Graf, Marlon Meng, Lisa Pahlke, Monika Pieniazek, Dierk Schmidt, Caroline Streck, Maximilian Wolter, Gabriel Weise
The melting of the Arctic ice is becoming the focus of public attention with increasing urgency. According to recent calculations, a large part of the Arctic Ocean could be ice-free as early as 2050 - which would also allow access to previously untapped extensive resource fields of natural gas and crude oil. A geopolitical interest of the littoral states will be accompanied by the sectional division of the Arctic deep seabed in the coming years. At the same time, this transformation of the Arctic (and Antarctic) is increasingly gaining public presence as an indication, a "clinical thermometer" of climate change, where global warming is three times higher, generating the immediate demand of the "right to be cold" (Sheila Watt-Cloutier, 2015).
In the context of legal, political-cartographic, and artistic languages, the project group took a close look at historical and contemporary undersea territorial claims around the Arctic and climate change to interrogate them as an example of a field of tension between "division" and communalization of a "frontier zone," a supposedly pristine borderland in this century-while simultaneously considering resource policies, climatic changes, and international legal principles and agreements.
Accordingly, we conceived our project as a multi-semester process of artistic-scientific inquiry, simultaneously seeking interdisciplinary points of connection and examining the discipline and methodology of Artistic Research itself. An excursion to Tromsø and Svalbard in October 2022 was the preliminary end point of the research.
The works now created by the participants in the exhibition Nine Images on the Right to Cold concretely address these contexts in examples. At the same time, the works ask about the construction of images and one's own position as well as about the relationship and handling of knowledge and appropriation - excerpts from the research and conversations can be viewed as a "backstage" section in the exhibition.
Exhibition period: 11.01.2023 - 04.02.2023
Opening hours: Wed - Sun from 15 to 19 clock
Opening: 10.01.2023 at 7 p.m.
Talk about the exhibition with invited guests: Wednesday, 18.01.2023 at 6 p.m.
Exhibition Hall of the Kunsthochschule Kassel
Menzelstraße 13, 34121 Kassel, Germany.
The exhibition is part of the research project "Art Research Practice documenta. Artistic and Curatorial Research at the documenta Institute", Innovation and Structural Development Budget of the State of Hesse (IB Standard) - period 2020-2022.