Against Apartheid – RADICAL ECOLOGY

DATE: Sep 28 - Dec 02, 2023	LOCATION: Plymouth	RESEARCH STRANDS: Climate Justice / Decolonisation / Ecology / Ritual / Water / Folklore / Art / More-Than-Human
FORMATS: Exhibition	NETWORKS: Open City	PARTNERS: KARST

Against Apartheid, Radical Ecology Exhibition at KARST Gallery, Plymouth Image: AGAINST APARTHEID curated by Ashish Ghadiali at KARST (photo: Luke Frost/KARST)

Curated by Ashish Ghadiali, Against Apartheid explores the origins of climate apartheid through the work of international contemporary artists, activists and scientists at KARST. It responded to new research from the leading edge of earth systems science that projects radical shifts through the course of the 21st century in what is known as “the human climate niche”.

UN Special Rapporteur, Philip Alston dubbed the potential outcome of anthropogenic climate change as “climate apartheid” – where life becomes impossible for increasing sections of the human population. This scenario would predominantly impact black and brown communities living on the frontlines of climate breakdown.

Against Apartheid situates this projected future in historic ecologies of empire – African enslavement, the middle passage, the plantation and the genocide of indigenous peoples as well as the geopolitics of international borders, urban air pollution and species migration.

Featured artists: Sue Williamson, Khaled Jarrar, Forensic Oceanography, Annalee Davis, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Sylvie Séma Glissant, Kedisha Coakley, Angela Camacho, Ashanti Hare and Iman Datoo. New representations of work by climate scientists affiliated with the University of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute and by activist collectives, Alarm Phone and the Anti-Raids Network, also feature.

Artists, activists and scientists included in the show put forward strategies for challenging the inherited culture of apartheid – restoring hidden lives and forgotten futures. Works in this group exhibition highlight the transcendence of race-thinking, new ecologies and the intergenerational and interspecies sensibilities through which our sense of future possibility is transfigured and transformed.

Against Apartheid is part of Open City - a season of decolonial art and public programming organised by Radical Ecology through autumn 2023 with partners across South-West England.