Art and Climate Change
Book Launch

Wednesday 16 November 2022, 6 p.m.

Join us for a presentation of the book Art and Climate Change with authors Maja and Reuben Fowkes.

Published in Thames & Hudson’s World of Art series, Art and Climate Change is dedicated to the abundance of enlightening artistic engagements with intensifying ecological breakdown. When the future of life on Earth is threatened, creative production for its own sake is not enough. Artists are calling for an active, collective reproachment with the planet and the uncovering of the exploitative structures that threaten the survival of people, animals, plants and natural entities. Exploring the meeting point of decolonial reparation and ecological restoration, artists are drawing on activist praxes, ecological theories, scientific insights and indigenous worldviews to engage with the climate crisis. Authors Maja and Reuben Fowkes examine art practices that respond to the Anthropocene and its detrimental impact on the planet’s climate, from scenes of nature decimated by ongoing extinction events and landscapes turned to waste by extraction, to art coming out of the communities most affected by the environmental injustice of climate change. This evening of discussion at +MSUM is an occasion to gather together around the uncertainties and urgencies of the age of climate chaos.


Maja and Reuben Fowkes are founders of the Translocal Institute for Contemporary Art and directors of the Postsocialist Art Centre (PACT) at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London. Their publications include Art and Climate Change (Thames & Hudson, 2022), Central and Eastern European Art Since 1950 (Thames & Hudson, 2020), Ilona Németh: Eastern Sugar (Sternberg Press, 2021), The Green Bloc: Neo-avant-garde Art and Ecology under Socialism (CEU Press, 2015), and a special issue of Third Text titled Actually Existing Artworlds of Socialism (2018). Their recent curatorial projects include the exhibitions Colliding Epistemes at Bozar Brussels (2022) and Potential Agrarianisms at Kunsthalle Bratislava (2021). Their research on the socialist Anthropocene in the visual arts is supported by a UKRI Frontier Research grant. 

Translogical Institute for Contemporary Art