StateoftheART invites new and emerging artists to enter the StateoftheART Gallery Award and take a step towards being discovered.
"Extreme weather patterns like the tornadoes and extreme storms seen in KwaZulu-Natal this week will become more commonplace as a result of climate change"- Professor Alistair Clulow, University of KwaZulu-Natal (2019)
"At a time of planetary emergency, artists need to be more than artisans who produce commodities to be bought and sold for audiences' aesthetic pleasure. They need to reclaim their place as society's primary storytellers and disrupt the cultural narrative that's allowing predatory extraction of an exhausted and dying natural world"
- Leonie Joubert, Science Writer & award-winning South African author
The term “Climate Change” is ambivalent: it describes a process, development, or state - which can be both reversible, and irreversible.
Reversible: we collectively, as either an individual or organization, make the commitment to personally influence our environment, to actively prevent “the climate crisis”.
Irreversible: we have left it too late to take action to positively influence the climate crisis, and have to accept the consequences of “climate change”.
Much has been written and spoken about the impact of climate change and the consequences of inaction. But art can make an impact and evoke feelings that are hard to express in words or speech. Art can express ideas that may be too complicated or abstract for other mediums - and climate change is one of the most complex problems of our time, in part because it's so difficult to communicate.
For the StateoftheART Gallery Award 2021, artists are asked to find ways to engage with the reality of climate crisis and its impact on their own community; to create work to inspire and encourage societal change within their community - and within the broader South African context.
