Speakers
Amanda Boetzkes
Amanda Boetzkes is Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Guelph. Her research focuses on the aesthetics and ethics of art as these intersect with ecology and visual technologies of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
She is the author of Plastic Capitalism: Contemporary Art and the Drive to Waste (MIT Press, 2019), The Ethics of Earth Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), and co-editor of Heidegger and the Work of Art History (Ashgate, 2014). She has published in the journals Afterimage; Postmodern Culture; The Large Glass, Art Journal; Art History; e-flux; Polygraph; Mediations; Weber; Reconstruction; and Antennae: The Journal of Nature and Visual Culture among others. Recent book chapters appear in Climate Realism (Routledge, 2020); Materialism and the Critique of Energy (MCM’, 2018); Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment (Fordham University Press, 2016); The Edinburgh Companion for Animal Studies (Edinburgh University Press, 2017); and Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Politics, Aesthetics, Environments and Epistemologies (Open Humanities Press, 2015). Her current project, Ecologicity, Vision and Art for a World to Come considers modes of visualizing environments with a special focus on Arctic landscapes.
Photo credit: Courtesy of the speaker.
Jakob Kudsk Steensen
Jakob Kudsk Steensen creates immersive art installations that offer poetic interpretations about overlooked natural phenomena through collaborations with field biologists, composers and writers. Projects are based on extensive fieldwork of several months duration. Key collaborators include Composer and Musical Director for the Philip Glass Ensemble Michael Riesman, Ornithologist and author Dr. Douglas H. Pratt, Architect Sir David Adjaye OBE RA, BTS, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and the Natural History Museum London, among others.
He has recently exhibited internationally at the Venice Biennale, the Serpentine Galleries, the PinchukArtCentre, MATADERO Madrid, Tranen Center for Contemporary Art, Mac Lyon, Pylon-Hub, SXSW, BRIC Brooklyn, the 5th Trondheim Biennale for Art and Technology, the Carnegie Museum of Art, MAXXI Rome, FRIEZE London, among other institutions and festivals. He was the inaugural recipient of the Serpentine Galleries’ Augmented Architecture Commission, which was established with Google Arts & Culture and architect Sir David Adjaye, OBE in 2019. The Deep Listener was the first project of its kind to use Augmented Reality to take the public on an audio-visual ecological expedition through Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, London.
Photo credit: Hugo Glendinning.
Astrida Neimanis
Astrida Neimanis is a cultural theorist working at the intersection of feminism and environmental change. Her research focuses on bodies, water and weather, and how they can help us reimagine justice, care, responsibility and relation in the time of climate catastrophe. Her most recent book, Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology, is a call for humans to examine our relationships to oceans, watersheds and other aquatic life forms from the perspective of our own primarily watery bodies, and our ecological, poetic and political connections to other bodies of water. Often in collaboration with other researchers, writers, artists and scientists, Astrida’s work features in academic publications, gallery exhibitions and catalogues, and as part of public workshops and events. Most recently, her collaboration with Clare Britton and Aunty Rhonda Dixon-Gorvenor was featured at the Shanghai Biennale at the Power Station of Art (2020-2021). Other collaborations include "Learning Endings" with artist Patty Chang and scientist Aleksija Neimanis (in progress) and "So Tired, the Sea", in collaboration with Dominique Baron-Bonarjee, Siouxzi Connor and Operation Crayweed, featured at the Lofoten Biennale's Kelp Congress (2019). After six years at the University of Sydney, Astrida recently joined UBC Okanagan on the unceded Syilx and Okanagan lands, in Kelowna, BC, Canada. She is Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Feminist Environmental Humanities.
Photo credit: Lucy Parakhina.
Stefanie Hessler
Stefanie Hessler is a curator, writer, and editor. Her work focuses on ecologies (particularly ocean ecologies) and technology from intersectional feminist and queer perspectives. She is the director of Kunsthall Trondheim in Norway, and project co-leader (with Katja Aglert) for the research-based transdisciplinary exhibition “Sex Ecologies” in collaboration with The Seed Box environmental humanities collaboratory, as well as editing the accompanying compendium on queer ecologies, sexuality, and care in more-than-human worlds (forthcoming, The MIT Press, 2021). Between 2020–22 Hessler is visiting research scholar at the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media at Westminster University in London, UK. She is curator of the 17th MOMENTA | Biennale de l’image, titled “Sensing Nature” in Montreal, Canada (upcoming, September 2021). Hessler regularly writes for publications like Art-Agenda, ArtReview, Flash Art, and Mousse Magazine. She is the author of Prospecting Ocean (The MIT Press, 2019), and has edited books like Life Itself (Koenig Books and Moderna Museet, 2016) and Imagining an Oceanic Worldview through Art and Science (The MIT Press, 2018).
Recent curatorial projects include “Frida Orupabo: How did you feel when you come out of the wilderness” and “Jenna Sutela: NO NO NSE NSE” at Kunsthall Trondheim (2020); “Down to Earth” (with Thomas Oberender, Tino Sehgal, Frédérique Aït-Touati, and others) at the Berliner Festspiele / Gropius Bau in Berlin (2020); “Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Tomás Saraceno: More-than-humans” at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid (2019); “Joan Jonas: Moving Off the Land II” at TBA21–Academy’s Ocean Space in Venice (2019); the 6th Athens Biennale (2018); the symposium “Practices of Attention” at the 33rd Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil (with D. Graham Burnett, 2018); and “Armin Linke: Prospecting Ocean” at the Institute of Marine Sciences in Venice (2018).
Photo credit: Brittany Nelson.
Wan-Chen Chang
Wan-Chen Chang is currently an associate researcher at Local Heritage, Environment and Globalization Multidisciplinary Research Unit of the National Museum of Natural History in France, a Professor of the Graduate Institute of Museum Studies of the Taipei National University of the Arts in Taiwan, the editor-in-chief of Arts Review and a member of the editorial board of Museology Quarterly. She was also a board member of the International Committee for Museology of ICOM, a standing board member of the Chinese Association of Museums and the chief editor of Museum and Culture.
She received her PhD in Muséologie at the Muséum National d’histoire Naturelle. Prior to her teaching duties, she has served at the National History Museum (Taiwan) and Taipei Fine Arts Museum, where she curated a number of international exhibitions and has been conducting interdisciplinary curatorial activities ever since. Her current research interests focus on exhibition narrative theories, collection studies, environmental humanities and museum studies, as well as the nineteenth-century Sino-French art exchange. Cooperating with Janet Laurence, she curated the exhibition ‘Entangled Garden for Plant Memory’ in 2020, in which she also included nature-historical objects connected to the colonial history of Taiwan. She is the author of On Museology (Sur la Muséologie)(2005) and The Narrative Turn of Contemporary Museum Exhibition (2014), and has published many academic papers in Chinese, English and French.
Photo credit: Courtesy of the speaker.
Janet Laurence
Janet Laurence’s practice is embedded in an aesthetics of care and is keenly aware of our interconnection with the elemental aspects of nature. Her works offer a slow and immersive engagement with natural ecologies through materials as diverse as glass, living plant matter, video, pigments, museum archives, and taxidermy specimens. Laurence’s work is dependent upon decades of research, which helps her construct poetic encounters with biophilia that reflect on science, wonder, and environmental loss. Her practice often incorporates organic qualities of transience, vividly communicating the importance and urgency of caring for threatened environments. Her work is included in numerous institutions, museums, universities and corporate collections as well as within architectural and landscaped public places, worldwide.
Laurence exhibits both locally and internationally and has been represented in major curated and survey exhibitions including: Know My Name, National Gallery of Australia (2020); Entangled Garden For Plant Memory, Yu-Hsiu Museum of Art, Taiwan (2020); Janet Laurence: After Nature, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2019); Deep Breathing: Resuscitation for the Reef, Muséum National D’Histories Naturelle, Paris, France (2015); After Eden, Sherman Contemporary Art
Foundation, Sydney (2012); Negotiating This World, National Gallery of Victoria (2012); 17th Biennale of Sydney (2010); In the Balance; Art for a Changing World, MCA, Sydney (2010); Clemenger Contemporary Art Award, NGV Melbourne (2009); Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art (2008), Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial, Japan (2003); Australian Perspecta (1985, 1991, 1997); 9th Biennale of Sydney (1992). She was also recently awarded the Australian Antarctic Arts Fellowship (2020).
A recipient of both a Rockefeller and Churchill Fellowship, the Alumni Award for the Arts, UNSW, and the John Clover Art Prize, Laurence was a Trustee of the Art Gallery of NSW, on the VAB Board of the Australia Council, and is currently Visiting Fellow at COFA NSW University.
Photo credit: Courtesy of the artist.
Ana Bilbao Yarto
Ana Bilbao Yarto is a lecturer in Modern and Contemporary art at the University of York. Her research focuses on contemporary art from the Global South and the histories of exhibition-making and art institutions, with a current emphasis on small visual arts organisations, extractivism, decolonial pedagogies, and the links between art, human and environmental rights. Prior to joining the University of York she was an editor of Afterall Journal and research fellow at the Afterall Research Centre at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.
Photo credit: Courtesy of the speaker.
Riar Rizaldi
Riar Rizaldi is an artist and filmmaker who was born in Indonesia and currently lives in Hong Kong. His main focus is on the relationship between capital and technology, extractivism and theoretical fiction. His works have been shown at Locarno Film Festival, BFI Southbank London, International Film Festival Rotterdam, NTT Inter-Communication Center Tokyo, Centre Pompidou Paris, Times Museum Guangzhou, and National Gallery of Indonesia, amongst others.
Photo credit: Courtesy of the artist.
