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Eco Visionaries : Confronting the planet in a state of emergency

Royal Academy

 

 

Artists of the climate crisis often have one foot in science.   Much looks like science fiction or laboratory experimentation. This exhibition is no exception.

 

It is a wide ranging show,  appropriate to a subject covering the diversity of the globe, and to the infinite potential of art to envision its changes.  One very simple piece of traditional sculpture, craft even, is Virgil Abloh’s Alaska Chair, which is distinctly off-kilter.  It points to climate change, potential human extinction even, reaching back to the Industrial Revolution, and forward to a whole unbalanced world.

 

Alexander Daisy Ginsberg’s piece The Substitute  is a white rhino, recently extinct, on a 5 metre screen.  We see a small four footed creature which grows in pixilated squares until we can make out the shape of the full adult animal.  It faces away from us then, accusingly, towards us.  

 

The most memorable work, by Rimini Protokoll, is the final one. We queue. What for?  We put on head phones, we sit down.  Is this a screen? A tank? An aquarium?  Wow these are jelly fish! Wafting.

 

After the initial surprise we take in what is beautiful, slow, peaceful, like our planet floating in space.  We could sit and watch all day.  A voice speaks and we realise that jelly fish may well outlive us.  We are encouraged to look at people coming into focus beyond the tank.  They are humans, and so are we, and so am I. We wave to them and they to us.  Bye bye.