Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics: Artists Reimagine the Arctic and Antarctic

"Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics considers the way artists, filmmakers, and activists use polar art to illustrate our current environmental crises as well as to reimagine our world and the ways we engage with it. Examining a wide range of contemporary art, photography, and film, Lisa E. Bloom shows how these works demonstrate the ways that our planetary crises are linked to climate change as well as a long history of colonialism and capitalism. Bloom insists on linking racial, sexual, and gendered discriminatory violence to wider environmental destruction, and she engages feminist, Black, indigenous, and non-western perspectives to address the exigencies of what we are experiencing now as the Anthropocene, or the new geological period characterized by ecosystem failures, rising sea levels, and climate-led migrations"--
Lisa E. Bloom considers the way artists, filmmakers, and activists in the Arctic and Antarctic use their art to illustrate our current environmental crises and to reconstruct public understanding of them.
In Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics, Lisa E. Bloom considers the ways artists, filmmakers, and activists in the Arctic and Antarctic represent our current environmental crises and reconstruct public understandings of them. Bloom engages feminist, Black, Indigenous, and non-Western perspectives to address the exigencies of the experience of the Anthropocene and its attendant ecosystem failures, rising sea levels, and climate-led migrations. As opposed to mainstream media depictions of climate change that feature apocalyptic spectacles of distant melting ice and desperate polar bears, artists such as Katja Aglert, Subhankar Banerjee, Joyce Campbell, Judit Hersko, Roni Horn, Isaac Julien, Zacharias Kunuk, Connie Samaras, and activist art collectives take a more complex poetic and political approach. In their films and visual and conceptual art, these artists link climate change to its social roots in colonialism and capitalism while challenging the suppression of information about environmental destruction and critiquing Western art institutions for their complicity. Bloom’s examination and contextualization of new polar aesthetics makes environmental degradation more legible while demonstrating that our own political agency is central to imagining and constructing a better world.