In Conversation: Ohan Breiding & Lisa E. Bloom

haring an interest in artistic representations of climate change, artist Ohan Breiding and Lisa E. Bloom, author of Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics: Artists Reimagine the Arctic and Antarctic (Duke University Press, 2022), will discuss Breiding’s multimedia exhibition, Belly of a Glacier, which functions as a moving eulogy for the soon-to-be-extinct Rhône Glacier.

About the Exhibition:
In 2019, Iceland constructed the first memorial to mark the death of its Okjökull glacier. Since then, funerals have been held around the world to mark the melting of glacier bodies. These rituals of collective grief amplify the current state of climate emergency while expressing the intimate entanglement of human and environmental well-being.

Co-organized with the Williams College Museum of Art, Ohan Breiding’s Belly of a Glacier features an experimental documentary film and a photographic installation that connect this act of mourning to ongoing practices of care that strive to preserve ice — a material that contains both remnants of the past and the conditions of a future world. Breiding captures the efforts of the residents of Obergoms, Switzerland, to drape the nearby Rhône Glacier with thermal blankets to insulate it from rising temperatures. Despite these hope-filled actions of ecological care, scientists predict the Rhône will have fully melted by 2050.

You may also like the following events from MASS MoCA:

• This Sunday, 17th August, 03:00 pm, Skate Jam in North Adams
• Next Thursday, 21st August, 03:00 pm, Summer Foraging with Wild Soul River in North Adams
• Next Thursday, 21st August, 05:00 pm, Diane DiMassa: Hothead Paisan in North Adams

Also check out other Arts events in North Adams, Exhibitions in North Adams, Literary Art events in North Adams.