The climate crisis needs all of us – politicians, citizens, activists, businesses – and the art world too. Over the last couple of years there have been a number of exhibitions in London around environmental themes, and the Hayward Gallery are the latest with Dear Earth – Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis.
The subtitle is important here. A lot of climate related art has been around awareness raising, or fairly loosely themed. This one looks to engage constructively, to create positive connections around a problem that can seem so huge and overwhelming.
Not that it dodges the hard questions, as is obvious from the outset. The first featured artist is Nigerian-born Otobong Nkanga, whose work investigates destructive mining practices, and the way that they fracture land and community. The largest piece in the room is a felled tree, suspended at an angle across the gallery space, but with hints that this is not the end of the story. Among the roots are three glass globes, each one containing a tiny ecosystem – fragile, tenuous, but holding the possibility of recovery and regrowth.
The next room features Andrea Bowers, who is an environmental activist as well as an artist. At the centre of the room is a ‘memorial’ to a grove of trees that she was unable to protect. She climbed a tree along with fellow activists, was arrested and the trees were cut down. The memorial is made from wood chips left behind, suspended with climbing gear. It remembers the trees and the protest, a reflection on what could not be saved. That theme of grief continues around the room, with large paintings marking extinct birds and plants, painted on ‘canvases’ made of cardboard scraps.
Much of the work on display is new, with seven commissions specially for Dear Earth. Only one artist was familiar to me already, a veteran of environmental art, Agnes Denes. You may have seen her 1982 work Wheatfield: A Confrontation – so called because this ordinary wheatfield was grown in Manhattan on a two acre scrap of land worth $4.5 billion.
Elsewhere, visitors step outside onto a balcony to view Jenny Kendler’s Birds Watching III, a display of 100 birds’ eyes on a metal gantry. It’s striking and colourful, and all the more surprising for its urban setting, with the London skyline visible in between the eyes. When we look at nature, Kendler suggests, nature also looks back at us. It prompts us to humbly reconsider the relationship between the two – especially given all 100 birds represented here are endangered.
There’s more to discover around the site, including the easily missed recycled stone mosaics in the roof garden next door on the Queen Elizabeth Hall (the garden is one of the area’s hidden gems anyway). I also liked Surrender (flag) 2023, by the Irish artist John Gerrard. It’s a video projection of a white flag made of vapour fluttering over a desert landscape. It looks like pollution, but its form “looks to the future, towards ideas of stoppage, parlay and submission to larger planetary realities.” The screen is a stone’s throw from Shell’s headquarters, which made me think about Shell running up the white flag and announcing their surrender to the logic of nature and survival.
A touchstone of the exhibition is an observation from Nkanga that “caring is a form of resistance,” and while there is grief and loss, anger and protest, there is also solidarity, connection, compassion and healing. We need all these things, and more besides, as we build the coalitions that will prevent climate disaster.
Along with the rest of the Southbank, the Hayward Gallery is working towards sustainability in practice as well as its curated exhibitions. They are lowering heat across the estate, switching to LED lighting, and greening the famously grey concrete district, including a recently planted pocket garden and mini-forest. They are currently trialling propelair toilets with a view to using them more widely, and food waste will be composted on site. Staff are reducing their travel and taking climate literacy courses. CO2 emissions have already been reduced by 42%, with the whole Southbank Centre reaching net zero by 2035.
Dear Earth opens on Wednesday and runs until September 3rd. It is part of the Southbank Centre’s Planet Summer series.
The Earthbound Report 