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Asia Society presents immersive photography and video exhibition visualizing the climate crisis

Bill McKibben

• https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/images-of-climate-change-that-cannot-be-missed

I think the single best collection of images of the climate crisis I’ve ever seen is the exhibit that will be up through early August at the Asia Society, on Park Avenue. (If that seems a parochial spot for a global exhibit, it is worth remembering that sixty per cent of the world’s population lives in Asia.)

Co-curated by the celebrated photographer Susan Meiselas and the exhibition designer Jeroen de Vries, and led by the Asia Society’s Orville Schell, the longtime China watcher and correspondent for The New Yorker (whose late brother Jonathan wrote “The Fate of the Earth, which first appeared in the magazine), “Coal + Ice” is an evolving project. The first version of it that I saw, several years ago, centered on some remarkable images from the mountain climber and cinematographer David Breashears, who died in March, at the age of sixty-eight. Beginning in 2007, he’d retraced the 1921 Mallory expedition to Everest, climbing to the same crags to photograph the same Rongbuk valley, to show the massive ice loss that had occurred in the intervening decades. Now those images, in this updated version of the exhibit, fill an entire wall: first you see historical photographs, some by George Mallory and others by the Italian photographer Vittorio Sella, and then the screen wipes right to left to bring up the modern image of the much diminished glacier. It’s mesmerizing, as are the video images on the opposite side of the room, of a titanic coal-mining machine scraping the side of a Chinese cliff...

NEW YORK — Climate change takes center stage at Asia Society with the presentation of COAL + ICE, an immersive photography and video exhibition taking place February 13 through August 11, 2024. The exhibition is accompanied by a multidisciplinary program series, with performances and activations throughout the city, designed to raise awareness and catalyze responses to the climate crisis.

• https://asiasociety.org/asia-society-presents-immersive-photography-and-video-exhibition-visualizing-climate-crisis

Encompassing work by over 30 photographers and artists from around the world, the exhibition traces a photographic arc of climate change spanning the past century, from deep within coal mines, to the melting glaciers of the greater Himalaya.

Greenhouse gases are warming the high-altitude climate of the Tibetan Plateau, disturbing the great rivers of Asia and disrupting the lives of billions of people downstream. Rising sea levels and extreme weather events are highlighted in the exhibition by an immersive presentation of the video installation Deluge by Gideon Mendel, documenting flooding around the world.

COAL + ICE is a collaborative visual experience that calls attention to the urgent global issue of climate change. Through intimate portraits and vast, altered landscapes, the works on view document the consequences triggered by our continued reliance on fossil fuels, and bring to life the environmental and human costs of climate change, in Asia and around the world.

The exhibition is presented across four floors of Asia Society in a series of projects by photographers, artists, and designers who foreground a range of differently scaled solutions to the climate crisis.

Co-curated by Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas and exhibition designer Jeroen de Vries, and led by Orville Schell, Asia Society Vice President and Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations, the exhibition has evolved since its initial premiere in Beijing in 2011.

A growing set of works from around the world visualizes the human consequences of climate change, including droughts, floods, fires, and migration. Each photographer's commitment to capturing our changing environment and its human toll is reflected in imagery curated from their long-term, authored bodies of work.

Visitors to the exhibition at Asia Society are greeted by a two-story presentation of two large-scale photographs by artist Clifford Ross capturing the menacing waves of Nazaré, Portugal, which swell up to 100 feet high with increased hurricane and storm activity.

Artist Maya Lin has created an interactive presentation from What Is Missing?, a memorial to the places and species we are losing during this sixth mass extinction that highlights memory, action, and hope, and shares new pathways toward a more livable planet.

Leveraging behavioral science, world-building, and storytelling, Jake Barton’s Accelerator 2050 features a time machine that invites visitors to text with an AI-derived version of their future self about the positive impact of the climate actions they will take now and in years to come.