One of the most spectacular projects ever realised by Christo and Jeanne-Claude is Surrounded Islands (1980-1983). Changing the actual face of the natural environment, the artist duo created a delicate symbiotic connection between art, city, and nature, without damaging the nature in any way. 

11 man-made islands in the Greater Miami region, which were mainly being misused for dumping garbage, were surrounded with 60 hectares of pink woven polypropylene fabric. The color was considered a poetic companion to the tropical vegetation of the uninhabited grassy islands, the light of the Miami sky, and the colors of the surrounding water.

A team of lawyers, a marine engineer, consulting engineers, a building contractor, a marine biologist, an ornithologist, and an expert on mammals worked together with Christo and Jeanne-Claude to prepare the project. 40 tons of garbage was removed and permits had to be secured from numerous authorities. Christo and Jeanne-Claude described the myriad of elements that brought their projects to life as integral to the artwork itself. 

Surrounded Islands is as magnetic and relevant today as it ever was. The intriguing pink shapes are suggesting new ways of seeing and relating to the familiar. This is truly needed if we are to change the way we inhabit our planet.

Venezuelan artist Luchita Hurtado (1920-2020) dedicated over eighty years of her extensive oeuvre to the investigation of universality and the connections that exist between the body and its larger context – nature, the environment, the cosmos.

Throughout her life, Hurtado maintained a commitment to environmental activism and directly transported this ecological awareness into her works. Illustrating life’s interdependence, the compositions of natural elements are accompanied by declarations that form explicit modes of protest.

At the heart of Pollinator Pathmaker is a growing network of Edition Gardens, custom-designed for the needs of local pollinating insects. A living artwork, Pollinator Pathmaker serves the natural world, rather than taking it as subject matter. The project asks humans to experience gardens from the viewpoint of at-risk pollinators, and to partake in their protection.

”I wanted to make art for pollinators, not about them. Pollinator Pathmaker is an ambitious art-led campaign to make living artworks for other species to enjoy. Can the audience for an artwork be more-than-human? Can art be useful in the ecological crisis?” – Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg.

Pollinator Pathmaker responds to the dramatic decline in pollinating insects. This collapse has been precipitated by habitat loss, pesticides, invasive species and climate change.

The first International Edition of Pollinator Pathmaker is commissioned by LAS Art Foundation, launching in summer 2023.

Originally commissioned by the Eden Project and funded by Garfield Weston Foundation. Additional founding supporters Gaia Art Foundation and collaborators Google Arts & Culture.

In the next hundred years, the nature of water on Earth will undergo a fundamental change. Glaciers will melt, the level of the sea will rise, and its acidity will change more than it has in the past 50 million years. These changes will affect all life on earth, everyone that we know, and everyone that we love. It is more complex than the mind can comprehend, greater than all of our past experience, bigger than language.

Andri Snær Magnason is an Icelandic writer and documentary film director. His book ‘On Time and Water’ examines the relationship to time in an age of ecological crisis.

“On Time and Water - a book about the most urgent issues of our times, how all elements of water are changing in the next 100 years. I use the history of my family to connect in an intimate way to dates like 2100, something that seems like a very distant future is the time of the people we will love most in our lives. To understand the future we must connect to the past.” – Andri Snær Magnason

James Turrell has inspired generations through his work, which is primarily an exploration of light and space. Roden Crater, an unprecedented large-scale artwork within a volcanic cinder cone, represents the culmination of Turrell’s lifelong research in the field of human visual and psychological perception.

Set in a stage that resonates directly with geologic time, Roden Crater’s chambers and tunnels create an ever-changing theater of natural phenomena by isolating and intensifying the light of the sun, moon, stars and planets. The Crater connects its guests to the multitude of celestial bodies seen from Earth and the light that reaches us from the beginning of time.

”I wanted the work to be enfolded in nature in such a way that light from the sun, moon and stars empowered the spaces...I wanted an area where you had a sense of standing on the planet.” – James Turrell

On view in 2019 on The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden, Alicja Kwade’s sculptural constellation "ParaPivot" consists of steel frames and stone collected from all over the world in an attempt to melt planet Earth back together.

Kwade said the lines within the stones represent compressed time, while the rectangular frames are meant to suggest the many systems — physical, economic, political — that govern our daily lives.

The work questions our beliefs in those systems, asking us to contemplate our position in the universe and assumptions about life on Earth.

Working with natural materials in their original setting and leaving his creations to be reclaimed by nature, Richard Long encourages the viewer to appreciate the straightforward, primal beauty of nature, and explores our relationship with the environment.

Moving stones between remote locations or treading a path through grass, Long's works leave minimal impact on their natural environment and are often erased by the progression of time.

TESTIMONIUM is an audio-visual work created from recordings from waste, recycling and wastewater facilities in Denmark and Latvia as well as from one of the world’s largest landfills; the Dandora dumpingsite in Nairobi, Kenya.

With vibration sensors placed inside endless piles of organic waste and on massive incinerators, hydrophones lowered in wastewater and heavily contaminated rivers, and acoustic microphones pointed at metal, glass and plastic sorted by hand or machine, TESTIMONIUM listens beyond the immediate stench from discarded matter and into its physical core and industrialised journey. An acoustically detailed powerful and bittersweet homage to the midden of civilisation and a testimonium for the future.

Exclusively accesible June 5 - June 30, 2023 for Art for a Healthy Planet on the occasion of World Environment Day.

Wolfgang Tillmans has consistently, relentlessly pushed the boundaries of photography. Hermine, a from 2016 is one of several images by Tillmans of the Atlantic Ocean. The impermanence of the photograph is strongly felt, a moment in time frozen before the suspended surf crashes into the sand. The work alludes to the impermanence of all things, and acknowledges the fragility of the natural world.

Emancipation, globalization and climate change are important themes in Laure Prouvost’s oeuvre. In Deep See Blue Surrounding You, which was presented at the Venice Biennale (2019), Prouvost created a dreamy sea landscape, making the threat of rising seas palpable – groups of eerie objects, debris, food waste, and plastic sea creatures lay on the turquoise-colour floor, a posthuman seabed.

With Pillage of the Sea, Rosa Barba creates a type of barrier against the future rise in the sea level. Each stone symbolizes a city whose fate is threated by climate change. Buenos Aires, Bangkok, Rio de Janeiro, Miami, Jakarta, and Chennai are each represented by a stone whose size corresponds to the number of people who live there. The position of each city in the tower reflects the actual altitude of the place and shows the relation to the steadily rising sea level.

The tide determines how much of the sculpture is visible at any given moment, reminding us to acknowledge our vulnerability and to revere nature.

Created between 2012 and 2018, the works in the series, The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction by Judy Chicago, explore the subjects of death, Chicago’s own mortality, and the tragic, ongoing extinction of many other species. Chicago asks viewers to contemplate their own fate as it is tied to the treatment of other species and the planet and understand the works’ foundation in the feminist principle that justice for women is connected to the need for a global justice that includes the humane treatment of all creatures.