Climate Action & Visual Culture

With the aim of fostering opportunities for networking and collaboration, Climate Action and Visual Culture is a PGR led initiative that brings together, introduces and reviews the work of 43 artists from all over the world, exploring the inter-relationship of climate action and visual culture through the mediums of text, photography, architecture, video, painting, animation, mixed media, and VR.

In the midst of the Covid-19 global pandemic, uncertainty and upheaval dominated the public sphere with both questions and solutions emerging on the necessity and importance to further support artistic and creative practices. From collective ideations on the future of the cultural and creative sector, to creating virtual spaces for sharing resources and experiences of best practice, free access skills sharing, donation of time and expertise, systems of support stemmed from initiatives that one can only refer to as acts of resilience and acts of care.

The Climate Action and Visual Culture project took life as a take-away of the What’s Next? online live event held in July 2020; an initiative falling into the descriptors of the previously mentioned examples of acts of care and of resilience, produced by Temporary Contemporary and supported by the Centre for Cultural Ecologies in Art, Design & Architecture at the University of Huddersfield, and the University of Huddersfield Graduate School.

This opportunity allowed the blossoming of a space in which thinking about the intermeshing of climate action and visual culture became particularly pressing, especially in light of the pandemic. Climate action implies consideration of environment in a wider sense, in which the environment we inhabit is deeply linked to the way in which we inhabit it, as well as what informs it.

Thinking through the inter-relationship of visual culture and climate action, the curatorial strategies applied, propose the bringing together of propositions from 43 different articulations of voices concerned with the exchange and inter-dependency of visual culture and climate action. Through the curation of the 43 submissions selected, a narrative emerges: specifically dedicated to highlighting the comprehensive dimensions in which climate action discourses perform in, inform, and are informed by visual culture.

The Climate Action and Visual Culture Team,
Laura Mateescu & Tabassum Ahmed
PhD Researchers, The University of Huddersfield