Abstracts and Bios

Amanda Boetzkes is Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Guelph, Canada. Her research focuses on the intersection of artistic practices with the life sciences and global systems of energy use. She is the author of Plastic Capitalism: Contemporary Art and the Drive to Waste (MIT Press, 2019) and The Ethics of Earth Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), and co-editor of Heidegger and the Work of Art History (Ashgate, 2014). She has published in the journals Postmodern Culture; Art Journal; Art History; Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture; Antennae: The Journal of Nature and Visual Culture; and Eflux among others. Recent book chapters appear in Materialism and the Critique of Energy (MCM’, 2018); Petrocultures: Oil, Energy, Culture (McGill-Queen’s Press, 2017); Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment (Fordham University Press, 2016); The Edinburgh Companion for Animal Studies (Edinburgh University Press, 2017); and Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Politics, Aesthetics, Environments and Epistemologies (Open Humanities Press, 2015). Her current project, Ecologicity, Vision and Art for a World to Come considers modes of visualizing environments with a special focus on the circumpolar North.

Jeff Diamanti is Lecturer in Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam.  His research, including his forthcoming book, Terminal Landscapes: Climate, Energy Culture and the Infrastructures of Postindustrial Capital, tracks the political and media ecology of fossil fuels. His essays have appeared in the journals Radical Philosophy, Postmodern Culture, Mediations, Western American Literature, Krisis, and Reviews in Cultural Theory, as well as the books Fueling Culture (Fordham UP) and A Companion to Critical and Cultural Studies (Wiley-Blackwell). Diamanti has edited a number of book and journal collections including Contemporary Marxist Theory (Bloomsbury 2014), Materialism and the Critique of Energy (MCM’ Press 2018), the Bloomsbury Companion to Marx (2018), Energy Culture (West Virginia University Press 2019), as well as a special issue of Reviews in Cultural Theory on “Energy Humanities” and a double issue of Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities on “Climate Realism.”

Mark Nuttall is Professor and Henry Marshall Tory Chair of Anthropology at the University of Alberta. He is the Project Head of the Climate and Society Research Group between the University of Alberta, University of Greenland, the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources, and the Greenland Climate Research Center. He was co-investigator of the EU-funded project “Ice, Climate and Economics”. He is the author of Climate, Society and Subsurface Politics in Greenland(Routledge, 2017) and co-author (with Klaus Dodds) of The Scramble for the Poles(2016) as well as co-editor of numerous books on energy infrastructure, climate change and Arctic landscapes.

Jessie Kleemann is an internationally renowned Greenlandic performance artist and poet. Her performances give a visceral sense of Arctic landscapes as they are embodied through myth, voice, sound and movement. In her performance Sassuma Arnaaat at the 2012 Liverpool Biennale, Kleemann animated a version of the myth of Sedna, the Inuit goddess of the sea. Her performances can be read for their capacity to articulate a planetary sensibility that encompasses at once a colonial history, decolonial resistance and a mythic expression of the element of ice. For At the Moraine, Kleemann will undertake a performance at the Greenland Ice Sheet entitled Arkhticós Doloros, a title that references Barry Lopez’s book Arctic Dreams.

Brice Noël specializes in glacier and climate modeling at the Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research, at Utrecht University. His research analyzes the dynamics of glacier mass loss at the Jacobshavn Glacier through the use of airborne altimetry and satellite imaging. His book, Modeling the Surface Mass Balance of the Greenland Ice Sheet and Neighbouring Ice Caps: A Dynamical and Statistical Downscaling Approach, discusses the development of a statistical downscaling algorithm that projects an existing meteorological model onto a 1km grid (as opposed to the standard 11km grid). Based on the output from this new model, Noël’s research team identifies 1997 as the tipping point for the mass balance of the Greenland Ice Caps. Since that time, the Ice Caps have become saturated with meltwater and have sustained mass loss. Noël and his research team have published in the journals Cryosphere, Nature, and Journal of Geophysical Research.

Mel Chin is a pioneering Conceptual artist, with an expertise in art-science collaborations among other projects. Chin is known for his site-remediation artwork Revival Field (1991-ongoing) in which he worked with geochemist, Dr. Rufus Chaney to prove the existence of hyperaccumulators, plants that extract heavy metals from the soil. The work is notable for its aesthetic terms and for producing empirical evidence of the hyperaccumulation process. The results of the artwork/experiment were published in peer-reviewed science journals, including Applied and Environmental Microbiology. The ecological orientation of his practice continues in his longstanding project, The Arctic is Paris first undertaken for the 2015 Paris Climate Change Conference. 

Shezad Dawood works across the disciplines of film, painting, neon, sculpture and more recently virtual reality to deconstruct systems of image, language, site and narrative. Using the editing process as a method to explore both meanings and forms, his practice often involves collaboration and knowledge exchange, mapping across geographic borders and communities. Through a fascination with the esoteric, otherness and science-fiction, Dawood interweaves histories, realities and symbolism to create richly layered artworks. His film works have been screened internationally, including Art Rotterdam (2018); New Adelphi Exhibition Gallery, Manchester (2018); Screen City Biennial, Stavanger (2017); Pera Film | Pera Museum, Istanbul (2016); MoMA, New York (2015); Floating Cinema, London (2015); Nitehawk Cinema, Brooklyn (2015); Kurz/ Dust, CCA Warsaw (2015); Art Dubai Film (2014); Aspen Art Museum (2014); Flatpack Film festival, FACT Liverpool, and Manchester Cornerhouse (2013).