Josh Kline’s installations for Climate Change at MOCA use a variety of different mediums to explore the environmental issues of today while focusing on a potential dystopian future.
From the museum-
Looking at our era through a lens of labor and class, Josh Kline (b. 1979, Philadelphia) speculates in his art on some of the most urgent issues facing the world in the coming decades. His largest body of work is an as-yet-untitled cycle of immersive installations, organized as chapters, that explores key political, economic, technological, ecological, and biological questions of the twenty-first century. Climate Change, gathered together for the first time at MOCA, is the cycle’s fourth chapter.
Climate Change is both an exhibition and a total work of art—a visceral suite of science-fiction installations that imagines a future sculpted by ruinous climate crisis and the ordinary people destined to inhabit it. Begun in 2018 and produced in sections over the last six years, the works in Climate Change were largely made during the COVID-19 pandemic and informed by events during those difficult years. In its profound disruption of ordinary life, the pandemic became, for Kline, a cipher for the looming climate catastrophe and unprecedented disruption of our lives that scientists predict will accelerate in the years ahead. Using dystopia as a point of entry rather than a diagnosis, he invites us to place ourselves within it and consider the rear view. What happens in a world where the systems built to sustain and extend capitalist enterprise and global hegemony melt down their own foundations? Is this the future that we want to live in? Can we build a new and more hopeful world from the ruins?
The images above are from Kline’s sculptural installation Personal Responsibility. Although set in the future, the rise of tent cities around the country today in combination with the need for temporary structures after recent destructive storms, make this work feel contemporary.
From the museum-
Personal Responsibility (2023-24), the core of Kline’s project Climate Change, is a sculptural installation set in the future, in the aftermath of climate disaster. Borrowing their forms from the temporary shelters used by refugees and migrants in the United States and around the world, the tentlike structures here serve as both home and workplace for “essential workers” — the individuals who will still have to physically go into work, often at great personal risk, while those in higher-paying jobs can work from home in comfort and safety.
The installation also features two sets of related videos. Capture and Sequestration (2023) centers four iconic commodities made from materials that powered America’s rise as the world’s preeminent military, economic, and cultural power: sugar, tobacco, cotton, and oil. Through these materials, it is possible to trace the lineage of human-made global warming and climate change back through America’s global empire and the industrial revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the most painful parts of US history —the enslavement of Africans and the theft of Indigenous land. The other videos are fictional interviews with people living through catastrophic climate change in a future America. Although set decades from now, these videos are informed by extensive research into survivors’ experiences of climate-related disasters such as Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, and Harvey and recent California wildfires. In visualizing and making relatable the forecasts of climate scientists, Kline raises questions about whether Americans are willing and able to work together to prepare for, and possibly mitigate, what is to come.
Below are images from Kline’s short film Adaptation (2019-2022).
From the museum about the work-
The short film Adaptation (2019-22) imagines a future Manhattan transformed by climate change and follows a team of relief workers at the end of their shift. Described by the artist as a “science fiction of ordinary life,” the film focuses on what tomorrow could be like for the working people who will clean up the inevitable mess resulting from the political and economic decisions of previous generations. The fictional workers of Adaptation survive by doing the kind of essential but poorly compensated, physically taxing jobs that society takes for granted.
Using primarily analogue special effects — scale models, miniatures, and matte shots-and 16mm color film instead of high-definition digital video, Kline creates an expressionistic science fiction that suggests a nostalgia for the present from the perspective of a future transformed by global warming. Although it was filmed in 2019, the work was completed during the pandemic, and its poetic voiceover and melancholy soundtrack, both added in 2020, quietly evoke the lockdown and quarantine in New York.
This exhibition closes 1/5/25.