Review of UNFOLD: A Cultural Response to Climate Change – Kings Place Gallery, London

Picture of a photograph by David Buckland.

Cape Farewell is a charitable organization created by artist David Buckland. Its mission is to stimulate cultural responses to climate change. Between 2007 and 2009 it asked several artists, musicians, and creative practitioners to take part in expeditions to the High Arctic and the Andes, in search of new voices to creatively address the issue of climate change. Some of the results and documents are now part of an exhibition curated by Chris Wainwright and Buckland himself at Kings Place Gallery in London.

Although I believe Cape Farewell is a great project and wish there were more similar initiatives, I must say that I did not enjoy this particular exhibition very much. Most notably the location was ill-judged. Kings Place Gallery is an art gallery inside the homonymous building on York Street. The building has good credentials: environmentally designed, it aims at merging arts and entertainment with office and conference spaces (there are also a music hall and a restaurant). Despite this, Kings Place cannot help looking like an archetypically corporate environment, made of big white empty walls, glass, steel, oak and dark leather. It is a place of comfort and anonymity, populated by men and women in dark suits, carrying leather briefcases. It is also the sort of place where art is used to decorate every corner. Emphasis on the verb – to decorate: the works hosted in the building seem to have been selected because of their invisibility, because they do not disturb and hardly provoke a reaction.

Unfortunately, this is the space that has been chosen to host Unfold, an exhibition that addresses the most disturbing and provocative issue we have to face today. Such an exhibition should speak loudly and ask for new frames. It should not remain unnoticed. This is not likely to happen at Kings Place, a space designed to make one feel comfortably numb, in the truest sense of the song. Plus, the works on display are relegated to a room and part of a corridor on the lower floor, squeezed in between other exhibitions and conference halls and hard to spot for the uninformed visitor.

As for the works, while there are panels with photographs of and statements by many of the participants in the expeditions, the actual works on display are few. There are a couple of photographs by Francesca Galeazzi showing the artist burying a gas cylinder in the ice, a metaphor for the idea of becoming “carbon neutral” by means of financing some offsetting project and feeling therefore entitled not to be bothered by the question of climate change any further. This is the work I liked most, together with the images of architect Sunan Prasad’s tethered helium balloons, which delineate between them 540 m², equivalent to one tonne of CO², which is the average emission per person per month in the UK.

I did not find the rest of the exhibition as interesting as those works. There are three photographs by Chris Wainwright, where ice illuminated with red light looks oxymoronically incandescent. David Buckland also engaged with ice and light and took pictures of icebergs on which he had projected sentences such as: ‘DISCOUNTING THE FUTURE, THE GREAT WHITE SALE, A HOT WIND MORE TERRIBLE THAN DARKNESS, SELF LOATHE SELF GREED SELF LOVE’. Those pictures are definitely iconic, but not really original or deep.

I suspect that there might be something deeply resistant to the visual arts in the icey environment of the Artic and the Andes. Those places, as some of the artists stress in their statements, are not for humans. They are asking to be left alone, they do not want us to mess with them. Put in art-theory terms, those places are a kind of infallible machine for evoking a sensation of sublime. But is there anything else that can be done with them? I suspect that photographs of big chunks of ice and stone, no matter how beautiful the lighting and how innovative the technique, all look the same in the end.

It is curious that, although many musicians took part in the expeditions (Laurie Anderson and Leslie Feist among others), musical works are not presented in the show, with the exception of the jazz accompanying poet Lemn Sissay’s video What if?.  I think this is a missed opportunity: not being a representational art, music escapes the mechanism of sublime and could allow for a wider spectrum of engagement with the topic of climate change as seen from the Artic.

I loved that some artists (notably architect Sunand Prasad, comedian Marcus Brigstocke and writer Ian McEwan) stressed in their statements that we need to be positive about climate change, since self-deprecation won’t do us any good and because it needs a story of hope to make public attention stay focussed on a certain topic. On the Cape Farewell website I found a quote from Albert Einstein, which is much in the same spirit: “You cannot solve the problem with the same thinking that caused the problem”. It can be said that it is a character of “the thinking that caused the problem” that art and science practice are conceived of as strictly separated. In bringing artists and scientists together the Cape Farewell project makes a step towards a new form of thinking. However, it is a long way to trace a new path and this exhibition runs the risks of getting lost in the vast white of the Arctic. Sophie Calle packed this feeling in her concise and earnest statement: “Can I say nothing?”.

Unfold is on at Kings Place Gallery until October 2^nd, free entrance.

http://www.capefarewell.com/art/exhibitions/unfold.html