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Against fossil capitalism! Creating Awareness and Acting Activist with Art

Panel discussion
Academy
Schillerplatz 3
1010 Vienna
Aula

In the concluding panel on questions of art, climate and activism, the artist Katrin Hornek and the artist Oliver Ressler will discuss perspectives of contemporary artistic interventions on the climate crisis with Vice Rector Ingeborg Erhart and the participants of the Action Day.

The starting points are the works of the two artists, in order to lead a discussion on the question of the effectiveness of artistic forms of protest in the light of overall social tendencies. To what extent can the artistic highlighting of grievances and actions have an effect beyond the merely symbolic and initiate real social changes? Can artistic strategies be used to fight fossil capitalism?

Katrin Hornek, alumna of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, winner of the Otto Mauer Prize 2021 and operator of the WWTF-funded interdisciplinary research project “The Anthropocene Surge - evolution, expansion and depth of Vienna's urban environment”, has for years pursued an artistic approach that examines how effects of capitalism, colonialism and exploitation are inscribed in the constitution of the earth. 

Oliver Ressler, a graduate of the University of Applied Arts, is an artist, filmmaker and activist. The climate crisis and forms of resistance are topics he has been working on for a long time, demonstrating that environmental issues are inextricably linked to economic and socio-political content. In his FWF research project “Barricading the Ice Sheets”, which has been running since 2019, he traces mobilisations, activities, assemblies and work meetings of climate activists and accompanies actions of civil disobedience.