Rethinking the Landscape: Future Imaginaries in Environmental Art and Eco-Art History

While the concept of the Anthropocene has become central to the discourse on climate crises, several scholars have criticized the essentializing use of the Anthropocene thesis, offering alternative terms, such as Capitalocene or Chthulucene (e.g. T. J. Demos 2017, Donna Haraway 2016). T. J. Demos, a leading scholar in environmental art history, considers the issues of climate change as “first and foremost a political crisis (italics are original)” that is perpetuated by colonialist attitudes of “destructive and utilitarian, idealized and exoticized...structuring of nature” (Demos 2016, 12). This panel proposes to examine diverse approaches to the ongoing global environmental crises in addition to critiques of neoliberalism from scholars, artists, and critics. How do we rethink art-historical methodologies, curatorial assumptions or practice-led research to consider Donna Haraway’s post-individualist approach to engage with non-human agents who exemplify interdependent and entangled agencies that are “involved in climate chaos as much as its antidote”? The panel invites submissions that engage critically with such topics as: Relational Aesthetics (Bourriaud 1998); planetary health, Land/Earth Art, which has recently inspired Land Art Biennales; landscape or environmental themed artworks and other projects, including, but not limited to, participatory and team-based works such as social practice, performance or film. The International Committee is especially interested in hearing from voices that represent the regions often deemed as peripheral or excluded from art-historical master narratives offering alternative views to the largely western scholarship on the subject of environmental art and eco-art history.