PUBLIC PROGRAMS F N O L U A Cultural Response to Climate Change September 30–December 15, 2011 All events take place in the gallery unless otherwise indicated. Sheila C. Johnson Design Center Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery Parsons The New School for Design 2 W. 13 Street, Ground Floor Open daily 12:00–6:00 p.m. and D until 8:00 p.m. on Thursdays Admission is free www.newschool.edu/sjdc INTRODUCTION CONTENTS These days, breezy conversations by the dating play. We’ll look at climate change in PANELS & CONVERSATIONS elevator about the weather soon dip into cities across the world as well as what could doldrums of worry about climate. It’s raining happen on our own Gowanus. We’ll learn Conversation with the Curators: David Buckland and Chris Wainwright 2 again and it’s been a sodden summer. We about Asia’s mega-deltas, everyday religion What Ifs: Climate Change and Creative Agency 2 find we know what flood zone we live in. and climate change in the Himalayas, the Climate Change: Art, Activism, and Research 4 Upstate farms have been ravaged, making waterlines of Venice, and Antarctica. We’ll Under Water: Climate Change, Insurance Risk, and New York Real Estate 5 our neighborhood greenmarkets places of listen to a musical performance of this What Insects Tell Us: A Conversation between David Dunn and Hugh Raffles 5 strange melancholy. We’re anxious about our clement world and also to what insects tell us. Southern Discomforts: A Focus on Antarctica 6 tap water and perplexed by spurious choices Students are invited to participate in a video between clean energy and clean water. contest and our radio students at WNSR will PERFORMANCES Into this comes U-n-f-o-l-d, an exhibition by direct a program from the gallery that deals artists inspired by some of the most remote, with these issues. New York Mud Pies or A Taste of Climate Change: Urban Reforestation in NYC 8 desolate, and beautiful places in the world This Clement World 9 whose faraway splendor we count on when If the exhibition is the dinner—rich, full, dense, we despair of things near and close. These and varied—these programs are the con- SYMPOSIA are no longer refuges however, their ice and versations for which one lingers after—well Rethinking Everyday Religion and Climate Change in the Himalayas 11 forests linked to our ways of living by ties fuelled, freewheeling, and fanciful. You want Water, Culture, and Climate Change 11 more weighty than reverie. to be there. And yet, it is precisely because of the centrality of reverie and myth in the relation- —Radhika Subramaniam SPECIAL EVENTS ships we have to these places, and to places New York Book Launch and Reception: Climate Change and Cities 13 even more trodden that allows us to stake Climate Change Art/Science Dating Game 13 a claim for the role of the creative voice in dealing with environmental crises. The BROWN BAGS: WORKS-IN-PROGRESS images, stories, and sounds that the artists of U-n-f-o-l-d bring into the gallery are, above all, Economics and Climate Change 15 expeditions into their imaginations—personal, Asia’s Changing Megadelta Systems 15 provocative, intimate, inciting—and they offer Repurpose Compostables 16 many openings for us to enter. Venice/New York: Waterlines 16 At the SJDC, we actively use exhibitions Climate Manipulation Station 17 to think—seeing them as incentives for the Designing for Resilience 18 alternative explorations of materials, con- A Retreating Goddess? Conflicting Interpretations of Climate Change 18 cepts, and approaches. Our hybrid curatorial Near the Gangotri Glacier agenda embraces exhibitions as frameworks for critical and active engagement with our VISUAL RESEARCH WORKSHOP world, for synthesis and reflection, and for a situated and contextual understanding of the Down the Gowanus: Climate in Concrete 19 kind of learning and research that happens at the university. We see the large windows of VIDEO our galleries as invitations as much to reach Cool Stories for when the Planet Gets Hot II and III (New York premiere) 20 out as to come in. Throughout the fall, the place of imagina- tion in the debates on climate change will RADIO be folded, masticated, and u-n-f-o-l-d-e-d AirSpace: WNSR New School Radio 21 through our public programs. Artists will speak about activism, intervention, and OTHER RELATED EVENTS AT THE NEW SCHOOL 22 research in their creative practices; culinary STUDENT VIDEO CONTEST 23 performance artists will give you a taste of CALENDAR 24–25 NYC soil; scientists and artists will grant a CREDITS INSIDE BACK COVER glimpse into their serious work and their PANELS & CONVERSATIONS PANELS & CONVERSATIONS Belgium. His work is represented in many da Cunha and his partner Anuradha Mathur of critical wetlands habitat (Blue Rocks) Conversation with the Curators: major public and private collections includ- have focused their artistic and design in the Gulf of Maine. In 2009 she began David Buckland and Chris Wainwright ing: Victoria and Albert Museum, London; expertise on cultural and ecological issues presenting performance workshops on her Arts Council England: Bibliothèque National, of contentious landscapes. Their investiga- theoretical approach to environmental res- Friday, September 30, 2011 Paris; the Polaroid Corporation, Boston, US; tions have taken them to diverse terrains toration, “Trigger Point Theory as Aesthetic 6:00–7:00 p.m. and Unilever, London. including the Lower Mississippi, New York, Activism.” The first event was at the Survival The curators of U-n-f-o-l-d in conversation Sundarbans, Bangalore, Mumbai, and most Academy, Copenhagen, Denmark, as part of with Sarah E. Lawrence. Sarah E. Lawrence is the Dean of the School recently, Jerusalem. An underlying thread in her participation as a formal observer for the of Art and Design History and Theory at da Cunha’s work is a concern for how water UCB, at the United Nations IPCC conference Parsons The New School for Design. For the is visualized and engaged in ways that lead on climate change. David Buckland is an artist whose lens-based last ten years, she served as the Director of to conditions of its excess and scarcity, but works have been exhibited worldwide. In the MA Program in the History of Decorative also the opportunities that its fluidity offers Susannah Sayler is an artist and co-founder 1999, Buckland presented a one-person Arts and Design, before which she was the for new visualizations of terrain, design of The Canary Project. Her current body of show of digitally mastered portraits of Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Curatorial imagination, and design practice. They are work, a series of photographic landscapes performers at London’s National Portrait Fellow at The Jewish Museum, New York. the authors of Mississippi Floods: Designing titled A History of the Future, has been Gallery. In 2000, Buckland created the Cape She received her undergraduate degree a Shifting Landscape (New Haven: Yale exhibited widely in group and solo shows Farewell project, which he now directs. A from Swarthmore College, and her masters University Press, 2001); Deccan Traverses: at: Exit Art (NY), Human Resources (LA), major international Cape Farewell touring and doctorate from Columbia University The Making of Bangalore’s Terrain (New Denver Museum of Contemporary Art – exhibition includes his video work The End of in Renaissance Art History and in Theory Delhi: Rupa and Co., 2006); and Soak: Creative Acts that Matter Program (Denver), Ice and two series of black glass collodion- and Criticism. Dr. Lawrence’s scholarship Mumbai in an Estuary (New Delhi: National Everson Museum of Art (Syracuse, NY), based photographic pieces and a series of focuses on Renaissance visual culture Gallery of Modern Art/Rupa and Co., 2009). ARTECH (Spain), Wave Hill (NY), Harvard twelve photographic glacial text projections. and antiquarianism in the work of Valerio Graduate School of Design (Cambridge, Buckland’s work was also shown in the UN Belli, Jacopo Strada, and Giovanni Battista Aviva Rahmani is an ecological artist who MA), Cleveland Museum of Natural History, touring Exhibition for World Environment Piranesi. She has curated such exhibitions as works with scientists to design solutions to and others. She has an upcoming exhibit at Day. In 2007, he projected on to the Gehry Crafting a Jewish Style: The Art of Bezalel, degraded environments. Shown and pub- The Nevada Museum of Art. In 2006, Sayler stage, Millennium Park, Chicago an hour- 1906–1996 (1998–1999) and Piranesi as lished internationally, she began her career and her long-time collaborator, Edward long video work Arctic made in collaboration Designer (2007–2008). In addition to courses as a performance artist in the late sixties Morris, co-founded The Canary Project, with the sound artist Max Eastley. He has on the visual culture of the Renaissance, as founder-director of the American Ritual which produces art and media that deepen produced two films for television:Art from she teaches the historiography and theory Theatre, a street theater group. Rahmani public understanding of climate change. the Arctic for the BBC, 2006 and Burning Ice, of decorative arts and methods of curatorial is currently an Affiliate at the Institute for To date, The Canary Project has produced 2010. Recently, he co-curated the exhibition practice. Arctic and Alpine research (INSTAAR), projects involving more than 30 artists, Earth—Art of a Changing World, at Royal University of Colorado at Boulder (UCB), and scientists, writers, designers, and educa- Academy, London. a researcher with the Zurich-Node group of tors. In 2008–09, Sayler was a Loeb Fellow the University of Plymouth, United Kingdom. at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.