An investigation by Oliver Ressler
Barricading the Ice Sheets is an exhibition about global warming, the climate justice movements and its relationship to the arts.
From the first COP (United Nations Climate Change Conference) in Germany in 1995 to the last one this year in Egypt, 27 years have passed in which global carbon emissions have not been reduced at all. As a result, global temperatures continue to rise. This inaction on the part of nation states has led people to act on their own, without representation. Horizontally organised climate movements have sprung up all over the world. These collective action movements have carried out blockades of fossil fuel extraction industries and transport routes, organised mobilisations against airport expansions, conducted successful divestment campaigns and stopped drilling in the Arctic. Or, as we have seen very recently, they have carried out protest actions in front of works of art in Europe’s most important museums.
The title Barricading the Ice Sheets refers to the scale of the emergency facing the climate justice movement and the scope of what it sets out to do. To barricade ice sheets as they melt is physically impossible, but the movement is attempting something historically unprecedented, because the planet has never in recorded human history confronted so absolute a threat. When Arctic ice melts, sea levels rise everywhere; islands and cities flood and sink, agriculture and fisheries falter and human life is compromised.
The exhibition Barricading the Ice Sheets presents films, photographic works and installations resulting from a decade of research by artist and filmmaker Oliver Ressler recording and documenting exemplary mobilisations, activities, assemblies and working meetings of climate movements around the world. The exhibition has travelled across the globe and can currently be viewed at LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, Gijón (28.01. – 09.09.2023), and The Showroom, London (18.04. – 24.06.2023).
Oliver Ressler produces installations, projects in public space, and films on economics, democracy, racism, climate breakdown, forms of resistance and social alternatives. He has completed forty-one films that have been screened in thousands of events of social movements, art institutions and film festivals. Find out more at https://www.ressler.at.