Kent Chan, Future Tropics, Gasworks London 2023 Installation
Maja and Reuben Fowkes on Kent Chan at Gasworks and Tomás Saraceno at the Serpentine Gallery, London
Amid the escalating climate crisis, many museums and galleries have pledged to change their curatorial choices and operating modes in favor of more sustainable practices. But what does this entail for the practice of reviewing art – not just in terms of one’s expected global mobility but also in terms of the criteria for evaluating what art is good or relevant in the face of impeding mass extinction? Maja and Reuben Fowke’s review evokes these questions based on the artworks and the particular exhibition designs of two shows that took place in London this summer: while Tomás Saraceno at the Serpentine Gallery deals with corporate greenwashing, Kent Chan at Gasworks presents a not-so-distant dystopian future ravaged by carbon emissions. How can it be justified to spend our limited resources on the making, preserving, and exhibiting of art? How must the criteria for aesthetic judgement be reconfigured to adequately respond to this unfolding anthropogenic catastrophe?
Institutional pledges to transform art spaces in response to the climate crisis swept the pre-pandemic art world in 2019, when museums and galleries across the planet declared a climate emergency. They are reflected in moves toward more eco-conscious curatorial choices, sustainable operating policies, and a futurological questioning of the raison d’être of art collection. The magnitude of climate breakdown also has repercussions for art criticism, despite the lingering attachment of highbrow critics to business-as-usual in the art world. With parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at 422 and counting, levels last reached three million years ago when temperatures were 10 degrees hotter and sea levels 35 meters higher,1 climate art criticism assesses exhibition practices against the backdrop of a planetary reckoning with the enormity of this unfolding anthropogenic catastrophe.
Two solo shows in London this summer encapsulate parallel but distinct approaches to the new conditions brought by climate derailment. At the Serpentine Gallery and spilling out into the surrounding royal parks, “Tomás Saraceno in Collaboration: Web(s) of Life” showcases the Argentinian artist’s long-standing preoccupations with fossil-fuel-free flight and the miraculous world of spiders. “Future Tropics,” the summer offering at Gasworks, a nonprofit gallery and residency center named after a nearby relic of carbon modernity, is the first UK solo exhibition of Amsterdam-based Singaporean artist Kent Chan. While Saraceno’s exhibition has a larger art-institutional footprint and is presented with greater technical prowess and eco-critical smoothness by a venue that “acknowledges the climate emergency and recognizes it as the most urgent issue of our time,”2 both shows are built around new works that go to the heart of the most acute issues in the climate debate and also bring comparable perspectives to the reflexive question of the sustainability of the art world.
“Web(s) of Life” articulates a clear ecological agenda in revealing, in the words of the artist, “false solutions and new forms of energy colonialism advancing in the name of a green transition.”3 The indictment of high-tech greenwashing is most cogent in the film Fly with Pacha, Into the Aerocene (2023), which chronicles Saraceno’s art-scientific quest, dating back to 2004, to solve the enigma of flying without fossil fuels, culminating in the launch of Aerocene Pacha in the salt flats of Argentina in January 2020. His emission-free airborne sculpture was emblazoned with the message “El agua y la vida valen mas que el litio” (“Water and Life are Worth More than Lithium,”)4 decrying hunger for the silvery-white metal – an essential component of rechargeable batteries to power digital lifestyles and for the switch to electric vehicles in the Global North – as the cause of a new cycle of extractivism in South America. The film revolves around the coming-together of Indigenous communities from the two Argentinian salt basins to draw up the “declaration of the Salinas Grandes and Laguna de Guayatayoc as a subject of rights,” demanding not just protection of the physical environment of the salt flats, but also recognition of “the diversity of feelings, values, knowledge, practices, abilities, transcendences, transformations, sciences, technologies, and norms of all cultures that seek to live in harmony with Nature.”5 This manifesto resonates powerfully with hopes for a planetary awakening that ushers in a counter-modern, beyond-green-capitalist, post-carbon, cosmopolitical, and socially-just ecological transition. Only obliquely addressed in the film is the issue that declaring rivers, mountains, glaciers and, in this case, salt flats to have legal rights within an expanded planetary jurisprudence may not be enough to guarantee their protection from extractivist operations, which continue to expand into new territories under the cover of the reassuring rhetoric of grey-green technocracy.
The two-channel video installation Future Tropics (2023) at the center of Kent Chan’s exhibition speaks not from the position of the life-and-nonlife drama of the climate struggle, but from a post-dystopian world après le déluge. Its protagonists recall the demise of the old tropics, when the “Great Lands were lost” and many people journeyed to the new tropics, in vessels since abandoned yet still floating out at sea, searching for meaning in mythological stories about multiple suns, gods, and monsters. The premise of the film – that as a result of global warming the climate of the Earth’s temperate zones will turn tropical while heat, drought, and flooding will render huge swathes of the planet uninhabitable – is a not-so-futuristic assessment of the impact of greenhouse gas emissions already released into the atmosphere. An accompanying work, Warm Fronts (2021–), consists of a four-channel video, arranged vertically on monitors, with footage of sets played by solitary DJs in the tropical regions of Brazil, Kenya, India, and Indonesia. The Indonesian DJ duo Gabber Modus Operandi play hard techno in the midst of lush vegetation, with one member mixing on an ironing board improvised as a DJ deck and the other energetically dancing wearing a techno-tribalist headdress. Two people dancing themselves into a nihilistic frenzy in the middle of a forest is a long way from the joyful mingling of bodies, music, and nature in rave culture, but Chan’s vision of sensory experience continuing even while society fails is an affecting statement of fact about the distressing prospect of a post-climatic world in which all seasons melt into one.
Through their exhibition design, both solo shows comment on the uncertain future facing
the Anthropocene art world as the climate emergency turns critical. At the Serpentine, the air conditioning has been switched off in the galleries, and audiences alerted that “should a heatwave occur, rather than using climate control, areas of the exhibition will close, and visitors will be encouraged to engage with the multispecies and interactive sculptures that populate the exterior of the building.”6 Communicated here is the understanding that it’s not just a matter of moving to renewable energy: climate breakdown will disrupt the normal functioning of the art world. On an overheating planet, art spaces will no longer be in a position to guarantee the comfort and safety of visitors, or for that matter, the precious artworks in their care. The technical equipment in “Web(s) of Life” is all powered from solar panels installed on the roof of the gallery, and a further pointed warning states that on overcast days the video projection may be weaker or completely fail. This marks a realistic turn in the discussion of art and sustainability, and an acknowledgement of the limitations of technological and behavioral measures of climate mitigation: keeping galleries cool with solar-powered A/C is irrelevant when forest fires turn the sky yellow, parched crops fail, and wet-bulb temperatures cross the threshold of physiological survivability. The corresponding message of Saraceno’s open-air sculpture series Cloud City: Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (2023), which includes objects for dogs, houses for hedgehogs, and steps for squirrels, is that as we stand on the precipice of mass extinction, it’s time to relinquish the illusion of human exceptionalism and reach across the species divide.
At Gasworks, not only is there no air conditioning, but electric heaters and drums of steaming water have been installed in the gallery to recreate the hot and misty conditions of the future tropics. One of the characters in Chan’s film, the Curator of Climates, reminisces how air-conditioned museums functioned as sanctuaries when the Great Heat began, a memory from the future tropics that is perilously close to the present, as museums were amongst the public spaces in the UK offering temporary refuge last summer to those unable to escape the insufferable heat. The use of retro electric bar heaters in the gallery space could be seen as an artistic strategy of épater la bourgeoisie, intentionally disrupting not just the traditional climate-control systems of Western museums but also the sensibilities of environmentally conscious gallery goers. In other words, green virtue signaling for the incremental reduction of the art world’s carbon emissions – miniscule in the grand scheme of things – risks leaving underlying structures untouched and becoming a camouflage for inaction.
Climate art can, as a sincere form of ecorealism, contribute to raising consciousness about the entwined human and more-than-human realities of our fragile and interconnected planet, offer a potential way forward in confronting the dangers posed by ecological breakdown, and galvanize momentum for a one-minute-to-midnight ecological transition. While giving voice to the real aspirations of terrestrials for systemic change, such micro-affirmations of ecological futurity collide with the broken promises of 27 COP summits. Artistic engagements with climate change may also be more emotive and reflective, a collective preparation for the dire consequences of inaction. Meanwhile, to practice art criticism at 442 ppm requires attentiveness to ecological thinking and debates, fluency in the language of sustainability combined with an inner sensor for greenwash, and a readiness to admit that criteria for aesthetic judgement established in the era of petro-modernity may need to be reinvented.
“Kent Chan: Future Tropics,” Gasworks, London, May 25–September 10, 2023; “Tomás Saraceno in Collaboration: Web(s) of Life,” Serpentine Gallery, London, June 1–September 10, 2023.
