Mikhail Karikis at HOME, Manchester
It's getting harder to talk about climate change. When the discourse in its nascent stage of public awareness was led by scientific evidence and advice, it (perhaps naively) felt like an apolitical challenge facing all life on Earth as we know it; an objective truth and point of departure. But of course, we are still immersed, treading water, drowning in late-stage capitalism. If capitalism is the backdrop to our current lifestyles, then social media lies defiantly in the foreground. Issues that affect people, non-human life, and our immediate environments are never apolitical. Climate protesters increasingly being handed prison time attests to this [1].
Where there is profit to be made, the unscrupulous, shallow, shameless decisions are sure to follow. Initiatives working towards net zero targets are no longer viewed as unanimously progressive and positive. Mouthpieces for right-wing populism, with its frantic keenness to vilify and scapegoat, routinely argue that climate catastrophe is wildly exaggerated, and that the economy and working class people will be the first to suffer if governments focus on reducing their carbon emissions. Misinformation and climate denialism is gaining the sort of momentum that barely comes as a surprise given the state of our social media-obsessed world, never more so than in the week where Meta have revealed they are ending their fact-checking protocol [2].
So how do we talk about it? Perhaps more importantly, how do we form a collective with people who can inspire scientific reasoning and meaningful action? The power of exhibitions and contemporary art is a precarious and uncertain one; there is often a gnawing feeling that either the artist is preaching to the converted, or that the message is aesthetically interesting, but not sufficient to mobilise real action. The responses and solutions to these challenges are very much individualised, but at HOME in Manchester, Greek-British artist Mikhail Karikis' video installation exhibition, Songs for the Storm to Come, addresses climate change both lyrically and directly.
The location itself plays a role in how successful the exhibition might be, and HOME in Manchester is a delightfully cosy, accessible space, with a cinema and events space that evokes a feeling of community energy and openness. It is a beautifully warm space, offering a rare opportunity to sit and do (and most importantly, buy) nothing, if that is what you need. Their gallery space is on the ground floor and, aside from the low lighting of Karikis' show, is entirely accessible.
Perhaps it is the isolation of the viewer among the darkness, the all-femme chorus and the alienating screens and subject matter, but the exhibition is unavoidably moving. An all-female and non-binary choir come together, huddled like a colony of penguins as they look directly towards the camera and sing in an almost cult-like repetition: "we are together because...", round and round, hypnotic, frustrating, curious. The group then disband and in another scene we see two choristers gathering round a map of London, highlighting the parts that will be destroyed and uninhabitable if, or when, the city is flooded as a result of climate change. Huge swathes of south and east London are drowned, obliterated, along with the homes and livelihoods of so many people.
The exhibition is a call-to-arms, which is increasingly difficult in times of over-stimulation, misinformation, and over-saturation of all media forms. Climate catastrophe as an apolitical issue is very much a misnomer, but Karikis has risen to the challenge of using elevated aesthetics and sound, both filmic and conversational, to bring the crisis to HOME's audiences. Given the male-dominated spheres of tech, business and governments, all of which are disproportionately slowing the progress we could be making towards saving the environment, I wasn't entirely comfortable with the use of an all-woman and non-binary choir. Without enforcing ideas around gender essentialism, the idea that men are visually devoid from the conversation in this particular space, aside from the artist being a man, is unnerving, reminding me of Jacqueline Harpman's book I Who Have Never Known Men, whereby an all-woman collective are kept hostage by men before being freed into a barren world and having to fend for themselves. The damage being done by climate change has the potential to wreak havoc on any gender, race, and walk of life, so the prospect of women taking up the work of educating and performing these truths is the one thing that did not sit well with me in Songs for the Storm to Come.
While its current iteration is running at HOME in Manchester until early February, summer 2025 will interestingly see Karikis' show tour to The Showroom in London, which was the setting of my last review. It is a striking and satisfying show that calls for solidarity, collective action, and embracing raw emotion around the challenges that are already of a dystopian nature in our lifetime.
[1] https://juststopoil.org/category/court-prison/
[2] https://www.campaignasia.com/article/meta-could-soon-be-the-largest-misinformation-platform-in-the-world/500176
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