RUYA Recommends: A Gallery of Climate Refugee Related Artworks
Justin Brice Guariglia, Climate Signals, (2019)
Justin Brice Guariglia, ‘Climate Signals’ (2018), collaboration with The Climate Museum.
Justin Brice Guariglia is an American artist known for large scale photography and installations. ‘Climate Signals’ (2018) took solar powered signs usually seen on public highways and installed them in public spaces across New York City. The signs flashed warnings such as “Human Agenda Ahead”, “Climate Denial Kills” and “50000000 Climate Refugees.”
The messages were shown in different languages across New York’s five boroughs, and many of the billboards were displayed in neighbourhoods near the water. With its 578 miles of shoreline, New York is greatly threatened by rising sea levels. Many of those who come to New York may soon leave it as climate refugees, making a city whose nickname is ‘The Melting Pot’ all the more relevant.
Otobong Nkanga, The Weight of Scars, (2015)
Otobong Nkanga, The Weight of Scars, (2015), Woven textile and photography. 4 tapestries 253 x 153 cm each. Photograph: M HKA.
Otobong Nkanga’s multi-media works question the history of land acquisition and usage. In The Weight of Scars (2015) photographs of a former mining region in Namibia are woven into the four panels of the textile piece. The images show a once populated site that now lies empty, with abandoned buildings and pipelines leaving their mark on the landscape.
The lines connecting the photographic plates create a constellation that mimics the networks formed by natural resource extrapolation and exchange. These circular photographs can be read as continents, their lands connected by patterns of trade and inevitably by migrants unable to live in areas destroyed by intense mining.
Rena Effendi, The Crossing Point, (2016)
Rena Effendi, photograph from The Crossing Point series, http://www.refendi.com/the-crossing-point. Effendi is represented by National Geographic Creative agency and ILEX Gallery.
The Azerbaijani photographer Rena Effendi established the environmental focus of her work through the early project Pipe Dreams: A chronicle of lives along the pipeline which followed 1,700 km oil pipeline, documenting the oil industry’s effect on people’s lives.
In this photograph from the series The Crossing Point a migrant family from South Sudan are seen crossing a field in Idomeni, on the border between Greece and Macedonia. Effendi’s series documented the movement of refugees and the precariousness of living in camps throghout Greece, Lebanon and Jordan, Around 12,000 migrants were stuck in makeshift camps in Idomeni when the border crossing point was closed in 2016. The issue of climate refugees underlies this image as the ongoing conflict in South Sudan is worsened by resource competition and climate change.
Lucy + Jorge Orta, Antarctica World Passport, (2017)
Lucy + Jorge Orta, Antartica World Passport, (2017), Part 1: Reconditioned military trailor, painted steel, glass, 9 steel bedframes, 9 bivouacs, diverse fabrics, canteens, felt blankets, various objects / Part 2: Reconditioned military trailor, painted steel, glass, wood, canteens, linens, various objects, Antarctica flag, Antarctica World Passports, stamps
The artistic duo Lucy + Jorge Orta’s research project ‘Antartica’ looks into the environment, autonomy, mobility and relationships between people. All of which are topics present in their sculpture-performance art piece Antarctica World Passport. The installation setting presents a passport office at which visitors engage in a participatory action of obtaining a passport. In the process the applicant is asked by the passport officer to pledge to a set of obligations including “To support humanitarian actions aiding displaced peoples of the world.”
Antartica World Passport incites the bearer to take action, and recognise themselves as a belonging to a collective of world citizens. It also pre-empts mass-movement in response to environmental factors as newly registered citizens populate a virtual world map that has ‘no—borders’. This connects passport bearers in the West with those in environmental catastrophe zones such as the Solomon Islands, Philippines, and Alaska.
Hashim Taeeh, Untitled, (2018)
Hashim Taeeh, Untitled, (2018) painting, Image courtesy of the artist.
Rivers are an ever present feature in the city of Basra, but they are under threat as the city’s environment has changed catastrophically. Dams built at the sources of the Tigris and Euphrates river prevented adequate levels of fresh water from entering water supplies, with seawater in its place the land in southern Iraq started to dry out and water became scarce.
Local artist Hashim Taeeh has responded to Basra’s water crisis in a series of paintings. The dark palette of Untitled suggests the murkiness of the once fresh water, and highlights the human impact of this environmental change through the central female figure. The effect of Basra’s water crisis on migration is evident, as those unable to farm have broken up their land, sold it to construction or petroleum companies and moved to the cities.
Lars Jan, Holoscenes, (2014-present)
HOLOSCENES, created by Early Morning Opera; Conceived and directed by Lars Jan; Originally produced by Mapp International Productions. This video is excerpted from a 12-hour live performance during Toronto's Scotiabank Nuit Blanche Festival, 2014.
The title of HOLOSCENES, Lars Jans multi-format suite of artworks, plays on ‘holocene’, the name given to the period on earth since the last major ice age. It is a fitting title as the series challenges our collective ability to think in the long term about climate. In the series, a performer is situated inside a plastic chamber that fills with 3,500 tonnes of water as they attempt to carry out everyday activities like eating a plate of ramen, or putting on an abaya.
Jans’ works enacts states of drowning, both within the tank’s water and within larger systems that allow us to ignore the climate crisis. By having the performers carry out actions that were chosen through a global open-submission, HOLOSCENES predicts some of the daily trials of a climate refugee.
Amy Balkin, A People's Archive of Sinking and Melting, (2012-present)
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Amy Balkin’s project links disparate locations such as Anvers Island (Antarctica), Nepal, New Orleans (USA), Panama, Senegal, Tuvalu, and the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Region (Russia) as places that are projected to disappear because of climate change. Before their inhabitants are forced to move, Balkin archives objects that have been chosen by them from their hometowns.
The growing collection of items is not just limited to objects that originated in the threatened place, but includes any number of detritus and flotsam that happens to be there. These items represent the contributor’s awareness that they are being turned into climate refugees due to “the geopolitical production of precarity and slow-onset dispossession.”