When art has a brush with the climate

What does art have to do with the environment? Be propaganda? Green-wash? Be an object to which protesters can glue themselves?

Most times, I don’t see that art makes very effective propaganda, or rather, vice versa (propaganda is rarely excellent art). Instead, I see how we humans have, from cave-paintings on, a fundamental need for art, regardless of its “purpose.” (I am reminded of how emphatic the artist Hassan Sharif was in making the point that art must not do anything, or it is no longer art, it is something else).

Still, as a curator, one of my jobs is to ask: “What does humanity need from art right now?”

With that question, living in Abu Dhabi has transformed my perspective. Any exhibition I mount here will be seen through two lenses: That of the viewer’s political-cultural context, and that of our physical environment. In particular, the UAE is shaped by the intensity of its desert and ocean. To live here requires distinct technologies of survival, past, present, and future. Those technologies become increasingly relevant as we advance into the era of global warming. My sense is that every exhibition I make, in some way, must be seen in light of the climate change question from here out.

I have the eco-anxiety of a parent. Since moving here 12 years ago, I have watched my infant son grow into a rambunctious tween, and wondered how to prepare him for the unknown world ahead. It gives me some relief to know I’m not alone in this: The UAE is thinking very explicitly about the future, exploring strategies for solutions to surviving and slowing environmental change. “Post-oil” was already a frequent topic of economic and environmental planning back in 2012, when it was not a common headline across the world as it is now.

In the past year, as the UAE was preparing to host COP28, I was often asked, “What can art do to help?” Certainly, art can scare us, inform us, agitate for change, or celebrate the beauty of natural environments. Still… Do we really need more scaring? Melting glaciers, rising waters, dying species, fires, tornadoes, drought, and ultimately climate-forced migration and limited resources: it’s already impossibly daunting.

In his photo series Al Sawaber, the late Tarek Al Ghoussein documented a once-futuristic, high-rise housing complex in Kuwait. His photos show it as abandoned, awaiting demolition. What was once the architecture of an ideal future was becoming the past: utopia and paradise arrive and then depart. This insight yielded the name of the exhibition in which I included this work, the only constant (which refers to change itself). Recognising, through art, that everything does change, makes the present moment, our present environment, that much more precious. Knowing that change is constant also gives reason to hope.

Now, we have an exhibition called Horizon on view at the NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery. It’s a solo show by the artist Blane De St. Croix and the fourth in a series of exhibitions that I’ve curated that deal with the landscape of the UAE, and the most explicitly directed at the question of climate change. But Horizon is the first exhibition in which you will encounter a toy train.

Maya Allison is executive director of The NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery and University Chief Curator