Photography, Ecology and Historical Change in the Anthropocene: Activating Archives connects photography, archives, ecology, and historical change, and critically applies the Anthropocene as framework to the in-depth study of artists’ projects. It discards single modes of seeing environmental transformations in favour of a multiple and de-centred environmental imagination.
Bergit Arends uses multi-disciplinary perspectives to view localised environmental, social, and political issues through research-based artistic practices. The book not only makes available original research into newly and recently discovered archives of ecological and historical change, but also shows how this research is manifest in exhibition formats. This book presents international, transhistorical projects by contemporary visual artists who use archives together with photography as documentary and performative media for the comparative study of environments and places. A wide array of artists from diverse backgrounds working primarily in Europe and North America from the 1970s to the present day are discussed and set in relation to Anthropocene narratives. Case studies include environmental archive-based work by Nguyen the Thuc, Christiane Eisler, Chrystel Lebas, Mark Dion, Joy Gregory and Philip Miller.
The event is chaired by Professor Dorothy Price. A short introduction to the series Photography, Place, Environment by series editor by Professor Liz Wells, and to the publication by Dr Bergit Arends is followed by a discussion with Dr Lucy Bradnock (The Courtauld) and Professor Beatrice von Bismarck (Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig, Germany).
Speakers
Dr Bergit Arends is a curator of contemporary art, historian of art and visual culture, and museum professional. She has a specialist interest in art and ecology within European and global contexts. Bergit was British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Bristol and The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, where she is now an Associate Lecturer and teaches the BA Special Option Sea of Dreams: A Tidalectic Approach to Modernism. She presents and publishes widely, recently on the politics of natural sciences collections and critical engagements, in ‘Unequal Earth’ (NaturKultur 2021), The Botanical City (2020), Botanical Drift (2018), Interdisciplinary Science Reviews (2018), and on decolonising natural history museums (Art in Science Museums 2019). She has curated contemporary art projects for the natural history museums in London and Berlin (Art/Nature 2019). Her doctoral research resulted among other in the award-winning publication Chrystel Lebas. Field Studies (2017). She is working on new research on critical coasts and on anticipatory landscape ecology.
Professor Dr Beatrice von Bismarck teaches art history, visual culture and cultures of the curatorial at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig, Germany. She worked as a curator of the department of 20th-century art at Städel Museum, Frankfurt, was co-founder and co-director of the Kunstraum der Universität Lüneburg, initiator of the M.A. Program Cultures of the Curatorial and co-directed the itinerant TRANScuratorial Academy (Berlin, Mumbai, Phnom Penh 2017-2018). Recent publications include “Archives on Show. Revoicing, Shapeshifting, Displacing – A Curatorial Glossary”, 2022 (Archive Books, Berlin) (ed.) and the monograph, “The Curatorial Condition”, 2022 (Sternberg Press, London).
Dr Lucy Bradnock is a specialist in modern and contemporary art in the United States, with a particular focus on histories of art in California and the American West; alternative sites and networks of artistic production and dissemination; Beat culture and counterculture; ecological and ecocritical histories of American art; and the intersection of art, activism, and radical theatre practice. She convenes the MA Special Option Ecologies in American Art, 1950 to Now. As Dean for Research, Dr Lucy Bradnock leads The Courtauld’s strategic research agenda. She is also Editor of the journal Art History.
Professor Dorothy Price is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and Critical Race Art History at The Courtauld Institute of Art. She is author of numerous publications and also works as a curator. Recent exhibitions have included Making Modernism at the Royal Academy of Arts in 2022, Claudette Johnson. Presence at The Courtauld Gallery in 2023 and Entangled Pasts 1768-Now. Art, Colonialism and Change at the Royal Academy of Arts, 2024. She is currently working on two books The Courage to Look and For Opacity: A Visual Poetics of Black British Art, and kickstarting a new research project on the circus in Weimar Germany.
