CLIMATE FUTURISM
TFN / PFC
[Pioneer Works] Brooklyn, NY
Multimedia installation
Climate Futurism, co-presented by Pioneer Works and Headlands Center for the Arts, features new commissions by artists Erica Deeman, Denice Frohman, and Olalekan Jeyifous. Curated by ecologist and climate policy expert Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, the exhibition represents the culmination of Headlands’s inaugural Threshold Fellowship, a two-year program which highlights the power and efficacy of artists’ methods and processes to imagine a more equitable future. Taking inspiration from Johnson’s forthcoming book, What If We Get It Right?, the artists are creating works that explore topics such as creating new traditions, transforming our food system, reconnecting with nature, strengthening our diasporas, and proceeding with justice and love.
Jeyifous expands on his ongoing series The Frozen Neighborhoods [TFN] (2020-current), which imagines a protopian, sustainable community in Brooklyn. The work posits a variety of advanced green technologies for the production and dissemination of food, seeds, and freshwater, set within an alternate world in which the government combats climate change through a market-based system of so-called “mobility credits” that curtails movement of the poor and working classes. For this iteration, Jeyifous casts a new fugitive network of farming societies located throughout a the region that he refers to as the “Proto-Farm Communities of Upstate, New York.” Presented as an expansive body of photomontages, 3D-printed scale models, a psychogeographic map, and an animated virtual reality video, the installation builds upon a vision of resilience and resistance that references the tradition of maroon communities, recast through the lens of an Afrofuturist, ecological, and “solarpunk meets salvage punk” world brimming with Black joy.
INSTALLATION PHOTOS
PHOTOMONTAGES [300cm x 200cm]
TFN to PFC / 2:30 total runtime