Abstract

How does climate justice relate to the situation in Gaza? What have ecocide and genocide got to do with art and academia? Art may address the tragedy of the human condition, but artworks that engage with specifics can be condemned as instrumental or didactic, while an “academic” subject is of purely theoretical interest, free from practical concerns. In this open conversation, David Cross and Rahul Patel confront the ‘chilling effect’ on art and academia, and explore how exercising artistic and academic freedom can release a flow of creative responses to the greatest challenges of these troubled times.

Session and activities

By sharing different perspectives, participants in this session will increase the common pool of cultural resources, so everyone can take away more than they bring to the discussion.

One of the effects of contemporary visual culture is to transform industrial-scale cruelty and ostentatious nihilism into spectacle. But while ecocide — the eradication of the planet’s life-support systems — still seems to be a tolerably abstract idea, people around the world are affronted by watching live coverage of genocide, which is justified through false reasoning. When artistic and academic freedom are threatened by arbitrary political constraints and weaponized distortions of meaning, it is time to creatively resist the destructive power of force and fraud.

Recognising the paralysis of anxiety and the numbing effect of disavowal could be the first step towards overcoming them, while piecing together fragmented accounts and contradictory influences could allow a shared understanding of the systemic issues that defy simple explanations of cause and effect.

In this session, David Cross will focus on the potential for creative and critical engagement with images to build shared understanding as a precondition for collective action to resist the assault on people and the planet, or to align cultural production with restorative justice and ecological insight.

Rahul Patel will relate the current crisis to historic struggles against imperialism, colonialism and war…