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November 1, 2019 – Review
“The Coming World: Ecology as the New Politics 2030—2100”
Philomena Epps
According to the data provided by an online carbon footprint calculator, by taking a return flight from London to Moscow, I was responsible for the emission of 0.43 tons of CO2e, or carbon dioxide equivalent. I was flying to attend the opening of “The Coming World: Ecology as the New Politics 2030–2100” at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, which features artistic responses to ecology and nature. The cognitive dissonance required to excuse the substantial environmental impact of traveling more than 2,500 kilometers in order to comment on an exhibition that explores climate change is one of numerous contradictions I encountered during my visit.
This ambitious show is comparable in scale to a museum hang. There are over 50 works by Russian and international artists, including numerous large-scale installations, such as John Akomfrah’s elegiac six-channel film Purple (2017); Anastasia Potemkina’s luminous, site-specific halotherapy environment Pass Me The Salt, Please (2019); and Doug Aitken’s vast The Garden (2017–19), in which viewers are able to enter a glass room enclosed within a verdant greenhouse structure, and, if they wish, to smash up its contents with a baton. Any humor to be found in the cartoonishly violent catharsis of Aitken’s hot-headed hothouse …