When audiences entered the so-called Oval Gallery at Lisbon’s Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT) in October 2018, the only thing they could see was an inexplicable expanse of garbage. With the inner ellipse of the space apparently filled with litter, it would take visitors a slow, painstaking descent along its enveloping ramp to finally realize that this awful amount of trash was suspended as a Damocles sword over a roughly 2,600-square-foot void (800 square meters). Entering this void, on the other hand, felt like walking into the sea, with rays of light streaming down through plastic debris. With its half-drowned sailboat, the atmosphere was awe-inspiring. Some may have felt a guilty wonder. Others felt a punch in the stomach. For most, it was likely the first time they had felt the environmental impact of human waste in their guts — that is, if you discount micro-plastics.
Titled “over flow,” this installation by Tadashi Kawamata was the first in which the artist moved away from his preferred material of wood debris found in urban environments. His desire to work with the theme of the sea, as a cultural reference connecting Japan and Portugal, was met by the curators’ prompt to use plastic debris collected over a month by an activist NGO on the coast around Lisbon. With a hint to the painting tradition of Hokusai and others — and always softly underscoring that he was not an ecological activist — Kawamata achieved a poetic and breathtaking concoction of sculptural expression with an environmental reflection.
This site-specific work was a side project in Eco-Visionaries – Art, Architecture and New Media After the Anthropocene, a collaborative curatorial initiative by six European art institutions. The locally curated exhibitions spanned over a year, traveling from Lisbon’s MAAT to Umeå’s Bildmuseet, and from Basel’s HeK to Gijon’s Laboral, culminating in displays at Madrid’s Matadero and London’s Royal Academy. It was an ambitious endeavor involving more than 80 artists, architects, and designers — which, in hindsight, was at the forefront of a vast ecological turn in museum programs and contemporary art production across the globe. In the seven years that bring us to today, with the urgency of climate change and a wider ecological crisis made clear enough, there are few art institutions on the planet that did not put up a show on the subject.
In that same year of 2018, after initial presentations in Copenhagen in 2014 and Paris in 2015, Olafur Eliasson offered “Ice Watch” to Tate Modern’s massive audiences as a “direct and tangible experience of the melting arctic ice.” Also in London, the Barbican Centre was not only one of the earlier institutions to address ecological matters in retrospective mode, with Radical Nature (2009), but it revisited the topic under diverse lights in Our time on Earth (2022) or RE/SISTERS: A Lens on Gender and Ecology (2023–24). Artists exploring different outcomes of the ecological crisis, such as Superflex, Tomás Saraceno or Julian Charriére became art world darlings.
By 2022, lifestyle outlets typically ran with titles such as “8 Sustainable Exhibitions from Around the World.” And in 2023, the first museum exclusively dedicated to the climate crisis, The Climate Museum, opened in New York. The move was so massive that, in that same year, the Bergamo Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Italy considered it pertinent to hold a conference on Museums at The Ecological Turn. If environmental art of the 1970s had mostly stayed in a restricted artistic circuit, art presentations focusing on ecological and environmental issues over the past 10 years have perfectly aligned with the incremental rise of these subjects in the broader public sphere.
This procession of attention-grabbing initiatives was the manifestation of another major turn in art production, after the cultural turn of the 1970s: the ethnographic turn of the 1990s, or the material turn of the early 21st century. As with every turn, however, the ecological turn risked being taken as just another intellectual trend in the humanities.
In the recent atmosphere of fast fashion and speedy cultural consumption, chances are that the ecological turn in the art world may be quickly regarded as an annoying, passing fad. Tellingly, in Hyperallergic’s 2024 list of the “Top 50 Exhibitions Around the World,” while art history, decolonialization, Indigenous art, gender, race, and politics thrived on, environmental concerns had become a sort of discrete undertone to a couple of projects — including, to complete the circle, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art’s The Plastic Bag Store: A Tragicomic Ode to the Foreverness of Plastic.
Thus, after the deluge came topic fatigue — as if the inexhaustible question of the ecological emergency could be drained. And as if artists could have already depicted, critiqued, raised awareness, and made calls for action on every aspect of what scientists now call a “wicked problem,” referring to an issue that is impossible or very difficult to solve, both due to its complexity and because its many interdependent aspects are contradictory, elusive, and permanently in flux. Much in the same way, scholar Timothy Morton called global warming a “hyperobject.” While confronting the broader ecological crisis requires skills from many different fields, often proposed solutions (think electric vehicles) just make things worse. This means that all ranges of knowledge production should be contributing to crack this problem — contemporary art included.
In Climax Change! How Architecture Must Transform in the Age of Ecological Emergency (2022), I made the case that architecture and urbanism must endure a complete paradigm shift in the next few years. With the built environment and its management contributing nearly 40% of energy-related global carbon emissions, these fields will either change radically or only add to the ongoing political failure to address the dire consequences of climate change. One might point out that this is not the case with art. Art was first with its ecological turn, still reflects on it, and continues to expand it to frameworks like the paradox of endless economic growth.
One may counter that art should remain autonomous from its surrounding reality — even if it risks irrelevance. Yet, in a moment of rising proto-fascism, if art is agency, it may rather want to join the political resistance against the erasures imposed by authoritarianism. Be it for trans rights, inclusion, or climate action, art can still have a crucial critical role, namely if it circumvents the temptation of escapism inherent to its classical autonomy or market bubble. Despite the ennui that the ecological topic by now elicits in the art world, artists can still produce unique insights on the multiple facets of the wicked problem that defines our present. If we still believe art offers ways of world-making, then art still has something to say about how we imagine the future of our planet after the ecological crisis.