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Maja and Reuben Fowkes are London-based curators, critics and art historians who investigate engagements in contemporary art with ecology, climate change and the Anthropocene. Their work also addresses the art history of the former socialist territories of Central and Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union.
Their book on Art and Climate Change was published in the Thames & Hudson World of Art series in 2022.[ citation needed ]
They are authors of Central and Eastern European Art Since 1950 (World of Art), published by Thames & Hudson in 2020, the "first ever comprehensive, transnational survey of the major movements and practitioners of recent art from Central and Eastern Europe." [1]
They head the Post-socialist Art Centre (PACT) at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London, focusing in their research on the Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts (SAVA) on the environmental histories and art histories of the socialist world during the Anthropocene.
They are the founders of the Translocal Institute for Contemporary Art, a centre for transnational research into East European art and ecology that operates across the disciplinary boundaries of art history, contemporary art and ecological thought.
They are the authors of Art and Climate Change, that "presents an overview of ecologically conscious contemporary art that addresses the climate emergency, as artists across the world call for an active, collective engagement with the planet, and illuminate some of the structures that threaten humanity’s survival." [2]
At UCL Institute of Advanced Studies they run a major ERC/UKRI funded research programme (2022-27) on the Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts that includes intensive research weeks with guest speakers around the topics such as extractivism, infrastructures and the countryside under socialism.
They edited the book Ilona Németh: Eastern Sugar (Sternberg Press, 2022), which explored the parallels between the social and environmental histories of East European sugar beet and Caribbean sugar cane during the Anthropocene "opening up planetary trajectories for postcapitalist alternatives." [3]
They wrote on "The Politics and Ecology of Invasive Species: A Changing Climate for Pioneering Plants" in the Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change (2021). [4]
They are curators of the Experimental Reading Room [5] which has been held in venues in Budapest, Vienna, Glasgow, Miami and London.[ citation needed ]
Their Danube River School brought together artists, writers, environmental historians and anthropologists for a series of symposiums, exhibitions and excursions into wilderness and resulted in the publication River Ecologies: Contemporary Art and Environmental Humanities on the Danube (2015). [6]
Interviews about their recent publications and work on the issue of art in the Anthropocene appeared in the online journal Arterritory [7] in 2023 and in the book Along Ecological Lines: Contemporary Art and Climate Crisis [8] in 1919.
Their Danube River School project between 2013 and 2015 brought together artists, writers, environmental historians and anthropologists for a series of symposiums, exhibitions and excursions into wilderness and resulted in the publication River Ecologies: Contemporary Art and Environmental Humanities on the Danube (2015), [9]
A major focus of their work is on researching East European art since 1945 and contemporary East European art.
They are co-authors of the Thames & Hudson World of Art series book on Central and Eastern European Art Since 1950, the first of its kind to survey the art of the region from the Second World War till today. [10]
Maja Fowkes is the author of The Green Bloc: Neo-avant-garde Art and Ecology under Socialism (2015). [11]
They co-directed the Getty Foundation Connecting Art Histories funded international programme Confrontations: Sessions in East European Art History based at the Post-socialist Art Centre (PACT, UCL) from 2018-22.
Their publications on East European art include two special issues of Third Text, the first on 'Socialist Eastern Europe' (2009), the second on ‘Actually Existing Artworlds under Socialism’ (2018). [12]
Their performative lecture Points East: An Artworld, a City and a Continent in Transformation, held at the Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) Glasgow in November 2019 restaged a seminal meeting of critics, artists and art historians at Glasgow’s Third Eye Centre in December 1990. [13]
Their article 'Placing Bookmarks: The Institutionalisation and De-Institutionalisation of Hungarian Neo-Avant-Garde and Contemporary Art' on the role of collectors, global museums and art historians in forming art historical narratives appeared in Tate Papers in 2016. [14]
They are the curators of the exhibition Potential Agrarianisms at Kunsthalle Bratislava in 2021, which set out to "diversify agriculture and pluralise its histories, recovering suppressed peasant pasts and activating their unrealised possibilities, destabilising urban-rural dichotomies, repairing the disconnect with the natural world and restoring caring and reciprocal relationships to the soils and plants that nourish us." [15]
With the field of art and science, they curated the exhibition Colliding Epistemes: Art, Science, Anthropocenes, which was held at venues in Poland, Brussels and Romania in 2022, and invited artists and visitors to consider what happens when the "epistemes of art and science collide, disciplinary boundaries dissolve, the hierarchies of Western thought are radically subverted, and hybrid forms of untamed knowledge of the world emerge." [16]
Their curated exhibitions include Revolution is not a Garden Party, which dealt with the legacy of the 1956 Revolution for contemporary art and was held at Trafo Gallery Budapest, Norwich Gallery and Galerija Miroslav Kraljevic in Zagreb in 2006-7. [17] The second part of their revolution trilogy is Revolution I Love You: 1968 in Art, Politics and Philosophy which was shown at the Centre for Contemporary Art Thessaloniki in summer 2008, as well as Trafo Gallery Budapest and International Project Space Birmingham. [18] Revolutionary Decadence: Foreign Artists in Budapestsince 1989 completed the trilogy and was shown at Kiscell Museum Budapest in November 2009. [19]
In 2010 and 2011 they curated the exhibition Loophole to Happiness that explored the freedom-enhancing loopholes that exist on the margins of social systems from East European communism to global capitalism, taking the inventive strategies of worker resistance under socialism as the starting point for contemporary attempts to imagine exceptions and find escape routes from today’s neo-liberal capitalist order. Held at Trafo Gallery Budapest, Museum Sztuki Lodz, Futura Centre for Contemporary Art Prague and AMT Project Bratislava, the exhibition also resulted in a samizdat publication. [20]
Their exhibition Like a Bird: Avian Ecologies in Contemporary Art examined complex questions around the changing human relationship to the natural world, the channelling of environmental awareness and its political dimensions and was shown at Trafo Gallery Budapest and tranzit.ro in Bucharest in 2014.
Carolyn Merchant is an American ecofeminist philosopher and historian of science most famous for her theory on The Death of Nature, whereby she identifies the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century as the period when science began to atomize, objectify, and dissect nature, foretelling its eventual conception as composed of inert atomic particles. Her works are important in the development of environmental history and the history of science. She is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Environmental History, Philosophy, and Ethics at UC Berkeley.
The Anthropocene was a rejected proposal for a geological epoch following the Holocene, dating from the commencement of significant human impact on Earth up to the present day. This impact affects Earth's oceans, geology, geomorphology, landscape, limnology, hydrology, ecosystems and climate. The effects of human activities on Earth can be seen for example in biodiversity loss and climate change. Various start dates for the Anthropocene have been proposed, ranging from the beginning of the Neolithic Revolution, to as recently as the 1960s. The biologist Eugene F. Stoermer is credited with first coining and using the term anthropocene informally in the 1980s; Paul J. Crutzen re-invented and popularized the term. However, in 2024 the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) and the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) rejected the Anthropocene Epoch proposal for inclusion in the Geologic Time Scale.
Ivan Tabaković was an Austro-Hungarian-born Serbian painter.
World of Art is a long established series of pocket-sized art books from the British publisher Thames & Hudson, comprising over 300 titles as of 2021. The books are typically around 200 pages, but heavily illustrated. Unlike some concise or popular art books, the layout is traditional with text and pictures often on the same page, but segregated. The series was launched in 1958, and over 300 titles have been published in all; according to Christopher Frayling, former Principal of the Royal College of Art, "there are paint-stained copies in every art school in the land".
The environmental humanities is an interdisciplinary area of research, drawing on the many environmental sub-disciplines that have emerged in the humanities over the past several decades, in particular environmental literature, environmental philosophy, environmental history, science and technology studies, environmental anthropology, and environmental communication. Environmental humanities employs humanistic questions about meaning, culture, values, ethics, and responsibilities to address pressing environmental problems. The environmental humanities aim to help bridge traditional divides between the sciences and the humanities, as well as between Western, Eastern, and Indigenous ways of relating to the natural world and the place of humans within it. The field also resists the traditional divide between "nature" and "culture," showing how many "environmental" issues have always been entangled in human questions of justice, labor, and politics. Environmental humanities is also a way of synthesizing methods from different fields to create new ways of thinking through environmental problems.
Environmental art is a range of artistic practices encompassing both historical approaches to nature in art and more recent ecological and politically motivated types of works. Environmental art has evolved away from formal concerns, for example monumental earthworks using earth as a sculptural material, towards a deeper relationship to systems, processes and phenomena in relationship to social concerns. Integrated social and ecological approaches developed as an ethical, restorative stance emerged in the 1990s. Over the past ten years environmental art has become a focal point of exhibitions around the world as the social and cultural aspects of climate change come to the forefront.
John Bellamy Foster is an American professor of sociology at the University of Oregon and editor of the Monthly Review. He writes about political economy of capitalism and economic crisis, ecology and ecological crisis, and Marxist theory. He has given numerous interviews, talks, and invited lectures, as well as written invited commentary, articles, and books on the subject.
Sustainable art is art in harmony with the key principles of sustainability, which include ecology, social justice, non-violence and grassroots democracy. Sustainable art may also be understood as art that is produced with consideration for the wider impact of the work and its reception in relationship to its environments.
This page is an index of sustainability articles.
Artpool Art Research Center is an archive, research space, specialist and media library in Budapest, Hungary, dedicated to international contemporary and avant-garde arts, such as Artist's books, artistamp, mail art, visual poetry, sound poetry, conceptual art, fluxus, installation, performance.
Ecological art is an art genre and artistic practice that seeks to preserve, remediate and/or vitalize the life forms, resources and ecology of Earth. Ecological art practitioners do this by applying the principles of ecosystems to living species and their habitats throughout the lithosphere, atmosphere, biosphere, and hydrosphere, including wilderness, rural, suburban and urban locations. Ecological art is a distinct genre from Environmental art in that it involves functional ecological systems-restoration, as well as socially engaged, activist, community-based interventions. Ecological art also addresses politics, culture, economics, ethics and aesthetics as they impact the conditions of ecosystems. Ecological art practitioners include artists, scientists, philosophers and activists who often collaborate on restoration, remediation and public awareness projects.
Carl Folke, is a trans-disciplinary environmental scientist and a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He is a specialist in economics, resilience, and social-ecological systems, viewing such systems as intertwined and potentially unexpected in their interactions. As a framework for resource management, this perspective brings important insights to environmental management, urban planning, and climate adaptation. He suggests ways to improve our ability to understand complex social-ecological interactions, deal with change, and build resilience, often working at smaller scales as a step towards addressing larger scales.
Eco-socialism is an ideology merging aspects of socialism with that of green politics, ecology and alter-globalization or anti-globalization. Eco-socialists generally believe that the expansion of the capitalist system is the cause of social exclusion, poverty, war and environmental degradation through globalization and imperialism, under the supervision of repressive states and transnational structures.
Aviva Rahmani is an Ecological artist whose public and ecological art projects have involved collaborative interdisciplinary community teams with scientists, planners, environmentalists and other artists. Her projects range from complete landscape restorations to museum venues that reference painting, sound and photography.
Ursula Biemann is a Swiss video artist, curator, educator, and art theorist.
Giovanni Aloi is an author and curator specializing in the representation of nature in modern and contemporary art. He teaches art history and visual culture at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is the Founder and Editor in Chief of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture and is the co-editor of the University of Minnesota Press book series Art after Nature. Aloi is also USA correspondent for Esse Magazine Art+Opinion.
The term collapsology is a neologism used to designate the transdisciplinary study of the risks of collapse of industrial civilization. It is concerned with the general collapse of societies induced by climate change, as well as "scarcity of resources, vast extinctions, and natural disasters." Although the concept of civilizational or societal collapse had already existed for many years, collapsology focuses its attention on contemporary, industrial, and globalized societies.
Cymene Howe is a cultural anthropologist and Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Rice University, Houston, Texas, United States. Her research has focused on environment, inequalities and the anthropology of climate change. She has also been active in multi-modal approaches to knowledge and public anthropology through podcasting, documentary filmmaking and installations, most notably the Okjökull memorial.
Catherine Elizabeth Rigby is a scholar in the interdisciplinary field of environmental humanities.
Nandita Kumar is a New Zealand new media artist. Her artwork often explores climate change, contradictions between natural and industrial landscapes, and personal identities and makes use of technological and interactive elements.