Hito Steyerl’s exhibition ‘Power Plants’ at the Serpentine was positioned around ideas of ‘power’. The artist considered the multiple meanings of the word, including electrical currents, the ecological powers of plants or natural elements, and the complex networks of authority that shape our environments. A series of video sculptures were generated by neural networks programmed to predict the future by calculating the next frame in the video. The artist used this Artificial Intelligence to create a series of ‘predicted’ plants that are located precisely 0.04 seconds in the future, connecting to the visual landscape of the surrounding park.

The work was inspired by the idea of a ruderal garden: an ensemble of plants that grow out of waste ground, perhaps in the wake of human disruption or destruction. Predicted by Steyerl’s neural networks as a vision of the future this environment is a garden rich with plants that have various ecological, medicinal and political powers. With an augmented reality layer, Steyerl annotated her video sculptures with speculative descriptions of future plants, fictitious quotes dated in the future and human testimony. Utilising a technology often positioned as beneficial to human evolution, the show reversed this promise, instead considering how such tools could impact our natural environment.

In 1977, Walter De Maria’s “The Lightning Field” was installed in a remote area of the desert in western New Mexico. The work comprises four hundred polished stainless steel poles installed in a grid measuring one mile by one kilometer; the poles, meant to attract lightning, measure over twenty feet tall and have solid pointed tips that define a horizontal plane. The visitor both walks within the grid and views it from afar, observing it over an extended period of time and through space.

Habitats is a film which shows how a selection of marine animals react and adapt to a series of sculptures of diatoms in glass, which Danish - Australian artist duo Studio ThinkingHand have developed in collaboration with the glass studio at Glas - Museum of Glass Art in Ebeltoft, Denmark and biologists from the Kattegat Centre in Grenaa, Denmark.

The film is a visual journey to investigate how we humans can form new ethics of care for the species with which we co-exist. How can we form positive environments for marine life in a time when we have left sea beds barren, temperatures are rising, and the shells of crustaceans are becoming thinner because the ocean is absorbing CO2 from the air? Habitats consizders relationships across species, and highlights adaptation as one of the most important factors in the development of species.

Prof. Dr. Johan Rockström believes that the visual arts sector should play a fundamental role in a safe and just landing for humanity on a healthy planet.

Prof. Dr. Johan Rockström is the Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Professor in Earth System Science at the University of Potsdam

Sarah Sze's 'Metronome' is shaped like a large, luminous globe constructed of thin steel tubes, on which a multitude of torn pieces of paper make up the canvas on which flickering videos are played, as well as on the floor and walls in the room around. Mimicking the speed and volatility that characterizes the age of the smartphone, the installation is a poetic interpretation of the times we live in; where the boundaries between the physical and the virtual become more and more blurred, while the environment on our planet becomes more and more fragile. Sze's work refers to the thin membrane of water, air and soil on the surface of our planet that is home to all life forms and which scientists call the critical zone.

The 9th Socle du Monde Art Festival at HEART – Herning Museum of Contemporary Art is all about a greater awareness of our environment in which up-cycling should play an important role.

Korean born artist Sui Park’s has created organic sculptures made of cable ties, thereby forming a poetic landscape that investigates nature’s relationship with humankind. Sui Park’s works involves creating three-dimensional forms in generic and biomorphic shapes.

Through these forms, she attempts to express seemingly static yet dynamic characteristics of our evolving lives through a material that increases the awareness of the polluting products we surround ourselves with.

For over 30 years, Yinka Shonibare CBE has used Western art history and literature to explore contemporary culture and national identities. ‘Suspended States’ showcases new works, interrogating how systems of power affect sites of refuge, debates on public statues, the ecological impact of colonialisation and the legacy of imperialism on conflict and consequential attempts at peace.

The 'African Bird Magic’ quilt series features endangered birds such as the Sokoke Scops Owl, Mauritius Fody and Comoro Blue Vanga. African masks hover over the birds, symbolising ancestors who were once custodians of the birds’ habitats before colonialism and industrialisation endangered many species. Shonibare celebrates these masks, explaining ‘they become symbols of African empowerment to challenge the consequences of Western colonial industrialisation in the degradation of the African environment.’ These works also serve as a warning, reflecting on the consequences of industrialisation and its subsequent ecological impact, and reminding us of the species that may yet become extinct if we do not take care of our environment.

Josh Kline 'Climate Change' is both an exhibition and a total work of art—an ambitious, immersive suite of science-fiction installations that imagines a future sculpted by ruinous climate crisis and the ordinary people destined to inhabit it.

Opening June 23 'Climate Change' is a visceral, charged work of 21st-century expanded cinema. In this vision, which could be called dystopian but in truth is terrifyingly near, a catastrophic sea-level rise has inundated the world’s coasts, unleashing a flood of hundreds of millions traumatized refugees. What happens in a world where the systems built to sustain and extend capitalist enterprise and global hegemony melt down their own foundations? Kline opens the door to such a future, inviting us to place ourselves within it and consider the rear view.

For Kader Attia, the desert draws attention to and raises questions about the destruction of our natural environment. Whistleblower presages a chaotic event that resembles Earth a billion years ago, or another planet… a place from where everything could start again. Amidst AlUla's landscape of rocks, sand and scarce vegetation, the wind caught Attia’s attention. Over time it has carved the sides of the cliffs and massive rocks with all kinds of niches, deep, large, and small, which sing together when the wind blows. While walking alone through the rocks with an empty bottle of water in hand, the artist witnessed the sound produced by the wind, echoing the whispers of the rocks. While grounded in the present, Whistleblower calls out our future as its blue glass bottles whistle when open to the wind. The haunting sound that results encourages viewers to reflect on the concern we should all have for planet Earth.

'Re-Stor(y)ing Oceania' platforms artists and communities who live and work in the vast and diverse region of islands and atolls in the southern hemisphere.

The Pacific Islands are one of the regions most impacted by the damaging effects of climate change, and their Indigenous leaders and communities have led the call for more study and greater awareness of the ensuing crises for decades. Peoples of the Pacific span over a quarter of the planet with ancestral relations that extend from Taiwan, Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Solomon’s, Tonga, Samoa, Fiji to Palau, Hawai’i in the north to the southernmost island of Aotearoa, to Rapa Nui in the east and to the west coast of the Australian continent.

Despite the formation of many Pacific Island Countries since 1962, the legacies of colonisation still affect Oceanic communities today – socially and economically through the ongoing exploitation of their natural resources. In a time of climate and environmental crisis Re-Stor(y)ing Oceania seeks to subvert this extractive trajectory through art, oratory, song, genealogy, performance, embodied knowledge, and Oceanic cosmological belief systems.

The commission presents Latai Taumoepeau's work Deep Communion sung in minor (ArchipelaGO, THIS IS NOT A DRILL) and Elisapeta Hinemoa Heta's The Body of Wainuiātea.

The exhibition is commissioned by TBA21–Academy and Artspace, Sydney, and produced in partnership with OGR Torino culture and innovation hub.​

'Orientation lights for rising seas', 2023 by Olafur Eliasson consists of five cylindrical lamps dividing a Qatar desert landscape into distinct sections of five colours of light. The solar-powered lamps are equipped with special lenses, a design originally developed to increase the amount of light emitted by the lamps used in lighthouses. By capturing and redirecting even oblique rays of light from the sources, the facetted structure focuses and increases the light emitted by the lamp, making it visible over greater distances. The lighthouses project the light directionally, so that individual colours are only visible by visitors approaching from one particular direction. In this way, they can be used to navigate the landscape. The work comments on the rising sea levels – one of the most dramatic impacts of the climate crisis for Qatar as the majority of the population lives in rural areas by the coast.

John Akomfrah explores the role of water in understanding our world in 'Listening All Night To The Rain' in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Through depictions of mist and fog, still and running water, floods and rain, the aquatic permeates every frame and note of the artwork. In theatrically staged tableaux and archival footage, water, like sound, moves in waves that parallel fluctuations of time.

It shares the experience of diaspora - of dispersion - from one space to another, often over water. The artist considers water as a reservoir for memory: a site where narratives from the past, present and future are held. In a world of climate catastrophes and rising sea levels, Akomfrah suggests that this logic can offer a means to navigate the present. Images depict the frontline of a climate crisis generated by colonial legacies.