Text by CLOT Magazine
Aphra Shemza is a London-based multimedia artist and curator. She is also co-founder of Art in Flux. As an artist and activist, she finds ambitious ways to fuse past methodologies with technological innovations to imagine art’s role in the future.
In collaboration with National Gallery, Aphra Shemza is launching this November 23 Radical Ecology: Media Art and the Environment. Using the National Gallery’s collection as a starting point, Radical Ecology: Media Art and the Environment will investigate the environment and landscape as a source of artistic inspiration and contemplation. Aphra Shemza has invited artist and creative technologist Ben Eaton, artist Sarah Craske and visual artist Frances Disley to explore climate change, ecology, sustainable practice and conservation in relation to their work.
In the aftermath of the COP26 climate summit and the global demonstrations that call for immediate action to prevent catastrophic global warming, Radical Ecology looks to art as a forum where future possibilities can be imagined and provide a discursive setting to explore these subjects in a media art context.
If we think of art as a tool with which artists can raise questions about our human existence, our lives, and the society we inhabit, then media artists are right at the forefront of this discourse. They work with technology and innovation, looking towards the future and are forced into a dialogue with our throw-away consumer culture as part of their process.
Radical Ecology: Media Art and the Environment runs on November 23 at 6.30pm GMT.
