This is a huge, stunning, world-bestriding and often very challenging exhibition. Its 250 photographs (and some films and video installations) cover the subject of women and the environment, providing a wide-ranging survey of the multiple ways the planet is being exploited and degraded, how women too often bearing the brunt of environmental destruction, and the scores of ways women artists and activists are fighting back, often creating a sense of female community in the process – hence the punning title of the show which is designed to promote the work of re-sisters, in the realms of social politics and art.

Huge volume of material

It’s a challenging exhibition to get your head around because the curators interpret the notion of environment in such a wide way as to bring together a huge variety of specific instances and examples of environmental degradation, each one of which is like reading a Sunday supplement feature. You could say it’s like reading about 50 serious magazine articles in a row i.e. quite demanding on your ability to process facts and figures. But it’s challenging in other ways, which I list below.

Environmental stories

Firstly, it’s about such a huge subject, the industrial-scale destruction of the environment, which comes in such a huge variety of forms and prompts some pretty big and scary thoughts.

Eyes and Storms #1 by Simryn Gill (2012)

Some of the subjects, such as vast open-cast mining in places like Australia or Namibia (in photo series by Simryn Gill and Otobong Nkanga), or the catastrophic impact of oil extraction in the Ogoniland area of southern Nigeria (depicted in the photos of Zina Saro-Wiwa), I knew about already.

• Karikpo Pipeline by Zina Saro-Wiwa

Similarly, the ruinous pollution of the world’s oceans, as conveyed in a video given a room of its own, A Draught of the Blue by Minerva Cuevas (2013) is a topic I feel I’ve been reading about for years.

But other subjects were completely new to me, such as the ruinous extraction of sand from places like the Mekong Delta in Vietnam (photos by Sim Chi Yin); or the impact of oil extraction in Azerbaijan. Although I knew about Azerbaijan’s historic importance, going as far back as the First World War, I don’t think I’d seen pictures of the area and its culture as evocative as the series of photos on display here by Chloe Dewe Matthews.

From the series Caspian: The Elements by Chloe Dewe Matthews (2010) Courtesy of the artist

I don’t think I’d come across the word extractivism before, which the curators define thus:

‘Extractivism is the exploitation, removal or exhaustion of natural resources on a massive scale. Rural, coastal, riverine, and Indigenous communities are disproportionately impacted by mining and other extractive industries, resulting in severe negative consequences on local livelihoods, community cohesion and the environment.’

There was lots and lots of new information about numerous aspects of environmental destruction to be read, understood and processed.

Women as victims

The curators move on to claim that environmental destruction or ‘ecocide’ particularly targets women, and especially women from Indigenous communities, and they’ve chosen exhibits and stories to back up this claim. Shanay Jhaveri, Head of Visual Arts at the Barbican, is quoted as saying:

‘In this era of deepening ecological crisis, we are proud to present RE/SISTERS which interrogates the disproportionate detrimental effects of extractive capitalism on women and in particular Global Majority groups.’

The curators claim there is a direct link between men’s degradation of the planet and men’s oppression of women. They are part of the same oppressive system. They call for the same kinds of resistance.

Straight men as culprits

Because the exhibition asserts (repeatedly) that the environmental crisis is caused by men, that it derives from male capitalism, from a male colonial and imperial mindset, from masculinism and white supremacism, from male-led multinational corporations, all of which are underpinned by patriarchal, masculinist, cis-heterosexual ideologies.

In the 80 or so very wordy, very theory-laden wall labels and picture captions, the curators claim that only men run ‘the mechanical, patriarchal order that is organised around the exploitation of natural resources’ and deploy the ‘masculine cultural imperialism’ that underpins it.

‘Terms such as Capitalocene, Plantationocene and Anthropocene act as cultural-geological markers that make clear that the violent abuses inflicted upon our ecological processes are inherently gendered, and shine a light on the toxic combination of globalised corporate hegemony and destructive masculinities that characterise the age of capitalism.’ (Catalogue page 16)

‘The violent abuses inflicted upon our ecological processes are inherently gendered’ and that gender is male.

‘Ecofeminist scholars have long critiqued feminised constructions of “nature” while challenging patriarchy, the masculinism of capitalism, and colonial abuses against nature, women and marginalised communities.’

And:

‘Caycedo’s photographs of rivers and waterfalls are remixed into pulsating, fractal, perception-shifting images that invite the viewer to reflect on the fluidity of bodies of water, which consistently resist the phallogocentric logic of extraction.’

The exhibition is based on notion of:

‘the connections between patriarchal domination and the violence perpetrated against women and nature’

The notion that the ongoing destruction of the environment, ravaging of nature, destruction of ecosystems and disruption of traditional ways of life of Indigenous peoples around the globe is a distinctively heterosexual male practice, with which women have no share or responsibility, is obviously controversial and debatable. It may be true in many aspects, and certainly when viewed through the exhibition’s strongly feminist lens, but surely some women somewhere are a bit involved in the capitalist extractive system, buy products, run companies, benefit from consumer capitalism?

Can the destruction of the earth really be blamed on just one gender? That’s what the curators are claiming. Along with the idea that only by overthrowing male power can the world be saved:

‘Critical of the term “revolution”, in 1974 the French ecofeminist Françoise D’Eaubonne proposed the term “mutation”, which, she argued, would enact a “great reversal” of man-centred power. This grand reversal of power does not imply a simple transfer of power from men to women, instead it suggests the radical “destruction of power” by women – the only group capable of executing a successful systemic change, one that could liberate women as well as the planet.’

Women as political resisters

But women aren’t just victims, no feminist would leave it at that. The curators move on to give lots of examples of the way women as individuals or groups are fighting back against all this ecocide. They are, in the curators’ words, practicing ‘a radical and intersectional brand of eco-feminism that is diverse, inclusive, and decolonial’.

I also found this theme challenging to get my head around because the examples of women’s resistance were so varied. For example, there are two big sections devoted to the anti-nuclear weapons protests led by women in the 1980s, one in the UK, one in the US (as documented by American photographer Joan E. Biren). The UK one was the women’s camp at Greenham Common airbase.

Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp: Embrace the Base action 12/12/1982 by Maggie Murray (1982) © Maggie Murray / Format Photographers Archive at Bishopsgate Institute Courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute

I worked my way along the wall of photographs from the camp’s heyday and the display case of posters and leaflets and badges and was a bit confused. I suppose this is an early example of women very consciously organising as women to resist an obviously destructive technology, but it felt different from protesting the environmental degradation of the mines or oil pollution or ocean pollution. OK, the nuclear missiles imported into the base threatened nuclear armageddon but…It felt slightly askew from the theme of the environment.

Not only that, it felt very old and a bit, well, clichéd. Greenham has been trotted out in umpteen different contexts, in anti-war exhibitions I’ve been to or shows about the 1980s or about political art and, well, it feels like trotting out a tired old favourite. Better to have had much more up-to-date and specifically environment-focused content.

Third World resistance

This was highlighted, somehow, by the series of photos in the same room by Poulomi Basu’s who has been documenting the activities of the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army who are fighting, with actual guns, against the activities of mining companies in south central India and the Indian security forces. Women take a lead role in the group and are depicted looking very warrior-like. But this obviously jarred with the message that conflict is somehow a very male creation, which emanated from the Greenham Common display.

Untitled from the series Centralia (2010 to 2020) by Poulomi Basu

It was also at odds with the other striking exhibit in the same room, which is a series of black-and-white documentary photos taken by Pamela Singh of the Chipko movement of women from the villages of the Garhwal Hills in the Himalayas in Uttarakhand, northern India. These protesters took to peacefully embracing trees to save them from state- and industry-sanctioned loggers.

Chipko Tree Huggers of the Himalayas number 4 by Pamela Singh © Pamela Singh Courtesy of sepiaEYE

According to the curators, these women ‘became emblematic of an international ecofeminist movement eager to showcase the subordination of women and nature by global multinationals while underscoring women’s environmental consciousness.’

Women artists

So far I’ve given the impression that this is a very political exhibition, and it is, and movements such as Greenham Common or the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army or the Chipko treehuggers are obviously collective movements or organisations which brought women together to achieve social and political goals.

However, this is an art exhibition in an art gallery and half or more of it has a significantly different feel from the early sections I’ve been describing with their factual, documentary feel.

Interwoven from the start are works by all kinds of artists who interpret the subject of the environment in the widest possible way and generate a very wide range of environment and protest-themed art. So in the early sections about mining and ‘extractivism’ are hung huge long flowing abstract fabrics by Carolina Caycedo.

Installation view of ‘Multiple clitoris’ by Carolina Caycedo (2016) (Photo by the author)

These, we are told, are part of her multidisciplinary project Be Dammed, which critiques the ‘mechanics of flow and control of dams and rivers’ to address ‘the privatisation of waterways and the social and environmental impact of extractive, large-scale infrastructural projects’.

These specific hangings are part of a series titled Water Portraits (2015 to the present), printed on silk, cotton or canvas and portray the water that carves through the long, narrow chasm known as Garganta del Diablo (Devil’s Throat), a canyon in the Iguazú Falls, on the border between Argentina and Brazil.

Now this is conceptually challenging because how are we meant to understand these lovely, colourful, semi-abstract hangings (there are 3 or 4 hanging from the ceiling throughout the show) as in any way really ‘resisting’ the activities of mining companies. They obviously don’t, or not in the same way that the Greenham women or the tree huggers were carrying out ‘direct action’ and explicit protest.

These kinds of works exist purely in the realm of art and art galleries, a realm which is, above all these days, extremely conceptual and intellectual. What I mean is Caycedo’s work is the result of a deep training in modern art and in turn triggers lengthy commentary from the art curators.

It’s a different world and a different type of discourse from that surrounding the political activity of Greenham and the huggers, which itself felt very different from the opening sections about the mining of oil and sand and ore.

What I’m getting at is there’s not just a lot of stuff and stories to read and process, but that they are drastically different types of information, from the kind of engineering stuff about extraction, to the rather nostalgic politics of the 1980s anti-nuke protests, through to something like this, what you could call traditional contemporary art, which asks to be processed and assessed partly for its ‘political’ intent, maybe (addressing ‘the privatisation of waterways and the social and environmental impact of extractive, large-scale infrastructural projects’) but also as works of art i.e. how you react to the size and shape and pattern and design, the fabric and the way it hangs in space. Whether you like it.

This requires activating a different part of your brain, a more floaty open receptive part, than the bit which had just been reading about mining techniques, or the bit which is activated by nostalgic photos from the 1980s.

Art about women’s bodies

But that’s not all. As the name of the work suggests, Multiple Clitoris is also saying something not just about women’s politics but about women’s bodies. According to the curators, Caycedo’s fabrics evoke ‘the feminist, orgasmic energy of our “corporeally connected aqueous community”‘ and are an example of the importance women artists give to their bodies.

It’s a truism of healthcare that women are more aware of, and take better care of, their bodies than men do. This is reflected in much contemporary art where women artists, and especially consciously feminist women artists, often take their own bodies as their subject, finding endless material in reflecting on and depicting their own or other women’s bodies.

This gender difference in attitudes stands out to me, in so many of the art exhibitions I’ve visited, because I’m a typical bloke and think of my body as a dumb machine which I use to carry around my mind, which is the thing which interests me. I consider my body boring. Not so many many many feminist artists.

Thus it is that, as the exhibition develops, the idea of organised political resistance which we encounter in the first few rooms develops into the idea that women’s bodies are themselves somehow a force of resistance or sites of resistance.

Whenever you go to an exhibition of women’s art you are going to read about ‘the male gaze’ and women’s attempts to escape, evade it and reclaim their own bodies, not as objectivised objects for male pleasure, but as the vehicles for their own perceptions and thoughts, to do with as they please. To reclaim ‘agency’ over their bodies.

And so it is that on the upper floor of the show that the visitor comes to a room devoted to feminist body art i.e. women artists who get naked, paint themselves, carry out performances naked, and so on. A good example is ‘Immolation’ from the series ‘Women and Smoke’, where, in the dim distant past of 1972, performance artist Faith Wilding got naked in the Californian desert, painted her body, set off smoke bombs and had herself photographed by artist and photographer Judy Chicago.

Immolation from Women and Smoke. Fireworks performance Performed by Faith Wilding in the California Desert by Judy Chicago (1972) © Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Photo courtesy of Through the Flower Archives Courtesy of the artist; Salon 94, New York; and Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco

The curators explain that:

‘In Immolation Chicago captures the performance artist Faith Wilding sitting cross-legged in the desert, enveloped in orange smoke. This work referenced the ongoing Vietnam War, the self-immolation of Buddhist monks, and similar acts by people in the United States, who were setting themselves alight to protest the war and advocate for peace, while the orange smoke alludes to Agent Orange, the herbicide that was sprayed to devastating effect in Vietnam.’

Women’s bodies and nature

I’ve always been confused by the disagreement among feminists themselves as to whether women – because their bodies are designed to conceive and bear children and they have historically done most if not all of the child care – are uniquely nurturing and caring and, therefore, have a kind of mystical understanding of Mother Nature unavailable to men. Or whether that’s a load of patronising, sexist, stereotyping garbage cooked up by the heteropatriarchy to keep women in their place.

The great universe of feminist thought seems to contain both, completely opposed, points of view. This exhibition seems to lean towards the women-as-nurturing and close-to-nature view. Here’s another example. I include the curator’s commentary in full.

Nature Self-Portrait #5 by Laura Aguilar (1996)

‘For Laura Aguilar, photography was instrumental in visualising her identity, and in the mid-1990s she began creating powerful black-and-white nude self-portraits in nature. In contrast to the heteropatriarchal settler-colonial tradition of landscape photography, Aguila’s portraiture homes in on her identity as a large-bodied, working class, queer Chicana woman. Mirroring the natural forms of the rocky desert landscape of the American Southwest, in her Nature Self-portrait series, Aguilar inserts herself into a “racially stratified landscape” to become a boulder or perform as a tree. As Macarena Gomez-Barris notes, Aguilar seems to want us to “trespass into the territory that feminists have long considered taboo by considering a profound relationship between the body and territory, one that provides a possibility for ecology of being in relation to the natural world. In that sense, her self-portraits provide a way to foreground modes of seeing that move away from capitalism, property and labour altogether, into a more unifying relationality that allows for haptic and sensuous relations with the natural world.” Ultimately, by affiliating her body with the natural beauty of the landscape, Aguilar’s work both empowers and transcends the various categories of her identification.’

Of this specific photo they say:

‘In these works, Aguilar photographs herself resting beside large boulders that seem to echo her curvaceous bodily form. Facing away from the camera, and folding inward, her body emulates the cracks and dents of the boulders while the shadows cast from her body intensify the affinity with the stones before her. In a sense she has “grounded” herself in a landscape that oscillates with “the largeness of her own body”.’

Nature Self-Portrait #5 by Laura Aguilar (1996) © Laura Aguilar Trust of 2016

The sequences of photos of women taking their clothes off and painting themselves in natural settings could be considered as the kind of entry level of the women-and-nature theme. However, some of the artists here have gone one step further to play with the idea of women turning into nature or natural objects; certainly moving beyond the merely human. Here’s what I mean:

The Body Covered with Straw by Fina Miralles (1975)

‘Fina Miralles’s conceptual photo-performance works from the 1970s embody a return to a profound relationship with nature. As she wrote in 1983 following a transformative five-month journey travelling through Argentina, Bolivia and Peru: “I am abandoning bourgeois culture and embracing Indigenous culture. The World Soul, Mother Earth and the protective and creative Pachamama.” Read through this lens, Miralles’s series Relating the Body and Natural Elements, in which the artist cocoons herself in straw, as seen here, or surrenders her body to sand or grass until she disappears, her body merging with the land, illustrates Donna Haraway’s concept of “becoming with” and offers a metaphysics grounded in connection, challenging the illusion of separation – the erroneous belief that it is somehow possible to exempt ourselves from earth’s ecological community.’

Relationship: The Body’s Relationship with Natural Elements. The Body Covered with Straw by Fina Miralles (1975) Courtesy of MACBA

The most striking variation on this theme of women-as-nature is the series of photos by Tee A. Corinne, titled Isis, where she photoshopped large close-up photos of a woman’s vulva into traditional landscape compositions so as to create surreal, disturbing (and beautiful?) juxtapositions.

Isis in the Woods by Tee A. Corinne (1986)

The curators explain that landscape painting has not only long been historically dominated by men, but in its very conception contains the idea of land ownership, precisely the kind of capitalist-colonial mindset which has brought the earth to the brink of ruin. So these ‘vulva landscapes’ are a way of subverting the male tradition of landscape painting and reclaiming it. They’re certainly about as in-your-face as the women-as-nature theme can be.

It is typical of the curators that they can’t explain the purpose of this kind of women’s art without taking a pop at  the men’s equivalent. I was saddened that they have a go at Land art which I love and have always thought of as promoting the value of walking through unsullied nature, leaving environmentally friendly, transient works, like a circle of stones. But, alas, Land art has mostly been created by men and so, in the eyes of the curators, is invalid:

‘In contrast with much Land art, which has staged large-scale and controlled interventions into the natural environment predominantly by men, the ecologically oriented works presented here by women artists place the body in communion with the land.’

Anyway, to go back up a couple of levels, my overall point is that all these women stripping off in the desert have brought us a long, long way from the highly factual documentary items which opened the show and recorded actual political resistance to open cast mines or oil exploitation in Nigeria, to tree felling in India or the deployment of nukes to Britain.

Taking photos of yourself naked in the woods or superimposing the image of a vulva onto landscapes is obviously a different register of information: it’s a different kind of subject matter, treated in a different way, to be processed with a different part of the mind.

It was this continual switching of subject matter, approaches, tones and registers which I found so challenging and exhausting about this exhibition. Which explains why, having read my way through the extensive wall captions on the ground floor, I realised I needed a break. I walked out of the gallery and spent five minutes staring out over the grey Barbican pond at the church of St Giles Cripplegate, trying to let all this information and babel of concepts soak in, before going back in to tackle the 12 further rooms on the first floor.

Other-than-human

Up here, on the first floor of the show, the curators arrive at the idea of the animals who live in these destroyed environments. In fact animals and wildlife in general are surprisingly absent from the exhibition. Maybe wildlife is excluded because the focus is overwhelmingly on women as the endangered species in this narrative.

When plants and trees, animals, birds and fish do crop up, it’s under the slightly odd terms of ‘other-than-human entities’, ‘other-than-human organisms’, ‘other-than-human habitats’, ‘other-than-human communities’ and so on.

The only exhibit which actually focuses on all the animals we’re driving to extinction is a film, ‘Ziggy and the Starfish’ by Anne Duk Hee Jordan (2018) which, characteristically, isn’t about pollution or extinction, but the curators’ number one subject, which is gender and sexuality. The curators turn animals into symbols of the kind of gender-fluid, anti-binary type of sexuality we are all nowadays meant to admire:

‘Taking its name from Ziggy Stardust, the androgynous, extraterrestrial rock star persona that musician David Bowie personified in the early 1970s , Anne Duk Hee Jordan’s sculptural video environment that houses the film Ziggy and the Starfish (2018) celebrates the fluidity of marine sexuality. The film pictures the sexual exploits of various ocean creatures with an exuberance and playful excitement, recalling the earlier work of the French photographer and filmmaker of marine life, Jean Painlevé. The effects of human-made climate change on the hydrosphere have become a key factor impacting the reproductive lives of marine animals, and by focusing on this aspect of the ecosphere Jordan underscores our deep entwinement with our fellow earthly inhabitants. In response to the present ecological crisis, the work offers a portal into the vivid world of our nonhuman cohabitors and looks to their colourful erotic lives as an example of how not only to think against binary dualisms, but to desire the seductively plural.’

Referring to other life forms on earth as other-than-human, defining them solely in terms of the species that is destroying them, feels like an odd conceptual strategy. I doubt whether the feminist curators would like being referred to as other-then-men.

The rights of ice

The theme of the non-human reaches a kind of logical conclusion with Susan Schuppli’s film reflecting on ‘the right of ice to remain cold’, as advocated by the Inuk activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier. Conceptually mind-bending though this sounds, in reality it is a lament for the global warming-triggered melting of sea ice of a pretty conventional, David Attenborough kind.

• Cold Rights by Susan Schuppli (2020)

Queer art

It is axiomatic of contemporary art that the only good man is a gay man, preferably Black. Toxic heterosexual white men have been oppressing women and destroying the planet for centuries so what we need is the opposite; gay Black men. So it is that a handful of men were allowed into this exhibition about women resisters, on the strict condition that they are gay.

This reminded me very much of the last big exhibition I came to here, the ‘Masculinities’ exhibition where, after a sustained and prolonged rubbishing of white heterosexual men, the ideal of masculinity held up by the curators was the writer James Baldwin, American, Black and gay. Same mentality here: white heterosexual men bad; Black gay (ideally American) men good.

Looking for ‘Looking for Langston’ by Ada M. Patterson (2021)

‘Looking for “Looking for Langston” by Ada M. Patterson is both inspired by and directly references Isaac Julien’s eponymous 1989 film, which offers a meditation on the life of the queer poet Langston Hughes and the wider cultural scene of the Harlem Renaissance in 1920s New York. As the title of the work suggests, Patterson, whose quest to learn more about the film ended in failure, constructs her own response that borrows from Hughes’s poetic imaginary as well as fragments she’s gleaned about Julien’s film. The result is a surreal and phantasmagoric exploration of Blackness and desire, using symbols such as the sailor and the sea to explore the fluidity of queerness. Patterson’s film also incorporates allusions to the histories of colonialism extant not only in Barbados (the artist’s birthplace and where this film was mostly shot) but also in Hughes’s United States and Julien’s United Kingdom. The film pays homage to these forebears, connected through oceanic bodies, legacies of Blackness and queerness, and the forever speculative pursuit of desire.’

Looking for ‘Looking for Langston’ by Ada M. Patterson (2021) Courtesy of Maria Korolevskaya and Copperfield

Personal favourite

A lot of the photography, especially the documentary photography, was good, very professional, but didn’t really pull my chain. My favourite image from the whole exhibition was this:

Mud by Uýra (2018)

‘Uýra is an indigenous artist, biologist and educator from Brazil who works in and around the riverine communities of the Amazon region. In these photo-performances, Uýra transforms into multi-species characters, fluidly merging the human and non-human by adorning herself with organic matter. Borrowing from the aesthetic language of drag, and its ability to disrupt the stasis of gender-normativity, Uýra exuberantly shows how other binaries, such as the one between human and nature, can also be understood to be fluid states that are performatively constructed. As an educator, Uýra also uses her works as pedagogical tools to uncover different forms of knowledge about the land that have been suppressed by the logic of Western extractive capitalism. In doing so, the works call for a material and spiritual restoration of the ravaged ecologies to which we belong.’

Lama (Mud) by Uýra (2018) Courtesy of the artist

Last word

Although I of course understand what the curators are getting at, and wouldn’t dispute the claims that women, especially in the developing world, often suffer most from the rapacious activities of multinational extractive corporations and of environmental destruction in general.

(It’s such a sweeping claim, it’s difficult to see how you’d even start to gather the evidence for the other side of the debate. I guess you’d start by pointing out that plenty of countries have or have had women leaders; plenty of multinational companies are run or staffed by women; plenty of women benefit from the products of all this extractivism e.g. cars, airplane flights, cheap clothes, cheap food, digital gizmos, that kind of line of argument).

But granted the truth of a lot of what the curators say, nonetheless, I still think I fundamentally disagree with their premises or, rather, I approach the whole situation from a different, more totalising angle.

For me it is blindingly obvious that it’s not heterosexual white men, it’s humans who are the problem. Whether they’re men or women, gay or straight, white or Black, from the developed or the developing world, humans everywhere are degrading and destroying the environments and ecosystems they live in.

I can see that the curators have a gallery to fill and so need clear, strong propositions to hang their exhibitions on. I appreciate that they are women, and feminists, so naturally see the environmental crisis through their personal and professional biases, through the ‘lens’ of their title. I can understand that women artists, even contemporary ones, might be considered overlooked and under-represented and so an exhibition which pulls together works from half a century by 50 or more women photographers and artists a) redresses the balance b) promotes the specifically womanist point of view and c) creates a sense of community and continuity between them. I think I do understand where this is all coming, and the sizeable merits of a feminist exhibition like this.

But, in my opinion, trying to portray all men as capitalist villains and all women as heroic resisters is not only patronisingly simplistic, it misses the bigger, more obvious point: that it’s people, people of all genders and skin colours who are destroying the world, the Chinese and Indians and Brazilians every bit as much as the wicked white Eurowesterners.

By trying to exempt women from any blame and cast them either as tragic victims or heroic resisters, I think the exhibition seeks to hide a bigger, bleaker truth: If you want to overthrow something, it isn’t the subset of issues to do with the cis-heteropatriarchy or white Western neo-colonialism, it isn’t one particular gender who you can pin everything onto – you should be trying to overthrow the tyranny of Homo sapiens over all the organisms of the world. We have to abolish ourselves.

Related links

• RE/SISTERS: A Lens on Gender and Ecology continues at the Barbican until 14 January 2024

Related environmental reviews

Books

• The Diversity of Life by E.O. Wilson (1992)
• The Sixth Extinction by Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin (1995)
• The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert (2014)

Exhibitions

• Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis @ the Hayward Gallery (2023)
• Eco-Visionaries: confronting a planet in a state of emergency @ the Royal Academy (2020)

Related art reviews

• Exhibitions by women artists
• Photography reviews
• Barbican reviews