Climate Summit Art. Art and Political Event, 1972-2022

• Applicant: Dr. Linn Burchert
• Subject Area: Art History
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 451978827

Even the very first UN environmental conferences served as a platform for artists to create works conceived for these political summits, both to highlight the climate issue and to do so using the occasion of the summit. Between 1972 and 1992, the meetings on the environment and global development were held at intervals of five to ten years; but beginning in 1995, the Conference of the Parties (COP) shifted to an annual schedule for the meeting of the international negotiating forum of delegates from politics, science, business and NGOs tasked with agreeing on measures to address climate change. Over time, art projects and exhibitions, as well as artistic activism, have become a standard feature of this context and a constituent element of the summit as mega-media event. Art, in its most diverse forms and expressions, typically occupies the urban spaces and institutions surrounding the action of these conference events. This phenomenon and its history have yet to be studied. The project is, therefore, the first to examine climate summit art as a corpus, with the objective of deriving specific aspects and developments that are characteristic of the developments in the relationship between art and politics, society and the economy since the 1970s. The task is to, against this background, explore the positioning and institutionalisation of art in the context of the political summit. In workshops and collaborations this theme will be extended to other events, such as art projects on the occasion of G8 and G20 summits, meetings of the World Economic Forum or political and institutional anniversary commemorations. One of the primary interests of the project is the underlying political, infrastructural and material requirements of art presentations, including an ongoing evaluation of the social characteristics of the artists and other participants in the broadest sense. For example, the project considers the questions of whether climate summit art is dominated by actors from the Global North, and whether the relationship has changed over the course of 50 years of climate summit art (and if so, how). The project utilises a database listing all the projects examined and clearly cataloguing additional information such as the artists’ places of origin and work, pieces that have been exhibited more than once, and individual funding institutions. At the end of the project, the full list will be published as a catalogue in the form of an extensive Excel table.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants