This is an outstanding exhibition. It may be my favourite exhibition of the year so far. Why? At least six reasons:

1. Empty It was empty. When I arrived at 10 past 10 there were 5 or 6 people in it. When I left an hour later there were more visitors, maybe 30 to 40, but I could still walk into a room and be the only person there. This is very rare at a gallery. At a blockbuster show at the National or British Museum, by 11 it would be so packed it often gets hard to see the pictures. Here I waltzed from one big white empty room to another, almost completely alone, like a private view.

2. Cold The Hayward’s galleries are, for the most part, big and spacious. On the first floor they are light and airy. And all of them have excellent air conditioning! I arrived hot foot from the boiling, sweaty tube, and the weather outside was warm and humid. So entering big, white, airy and beautifully cool spaces was a welcome balm to the senses.

3. Outstanding art This exhibition is full of outstanding pieces of modern art. I’ll pick out the four or five highlights below, but it feels like an excellent introduction to this is what art is like now, in 2023. Not old paintings by dead white men from 100 years ago. Many of the works are from just the last few years, no fewer than seven of them were commissioned specially for this show, so these are by way of being world premieres.

4. Big installations Many of these works are big and immersive. There are plenty of photos and paintings and a few rooms devoted to huge projections of videos i.e. traditional media. But half a dozen of the works are really massive and impressive and enjoyable. It’s just fun to walk around a very big work of art.

5. International And it’s very cosmopolitan, very international. Art these days is, of course, an international business, with a non-stop calendar of festivals and biennales which artists, curators and gallery owners have to jet to all around the world (Beijing, Dubai, Venice, Buenos Aires) and, thanks to the internet, works from exhibitions all round the world can be seen online. But this particular selection is deliberately global in range. It felt like a series of windows into alternative worldviews, from other countries, other sensibilities.

(I suppose if you were being cynical, you could argue the opposite; that all the works have a certain sameyness, if not of execution, then certainly of worldview and mindset, products of a fully globalised artworld with a highly conformist artspeak. Well, on this day, at this exhibition, I was in a good mood – helped by the lovely air-conditioning – and so responded lightly and brightly to all the shiny exhibits and chose not to be dour and cynical.)

6. Women artists And the majority of the artists are women. I’m not sure you could tell from just the art works alone, but on this particular day, on this particular visit, I enjoyed the knowledge of being surrounded by the work of caring sharing women; maybe it contributed, at some level, to the calming, healing, hugely enjoyable tone of the whole show.

Climate change

On the ramp up to the second room or space you’re confronted by a motto made of neon signage by the ‘passionate ecofeminist’ and American artist, Andrea Bowers. It’s from 2017 and reads CLIMATE CHANGE IS REAL. Maybe that was sort of necessary in 2017 but I think most people in the West now know about climate change, most educated people anyway.

Just over the last few days the front pages of the newspapers, on the radio and TV, there have been reports of Keir Starmer’s speech being interrupted by climate activists, Just Stop Oil disrupted the cricket test, protesters threw stuff at George Osborne’s wedding; there was the news that Monday and Tuesday had been the hottest days on record; the UN announced that the climate crisis is now out of control. So it’s no longer a niche issue: it’s all over the press and media on a pretty much daily basis, in fact it’s hard to ignore it.

Given almost universal awareness of the climate crisis, what is the point and aim of an exhibition like this? Let’s quote the press and publicity material issued by the Hayward Gallery:

‘Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis’ brings together fifteen pioneering artists from across the globe, many of whom have created new commissions for this exhibition. Their work invites us to imaginatively rethink our responses to many of today’s major environmental issues.

Taking its cue from Otobong Nkanga’s suggestion that ‘care is a form of resistance,’ the exhibition focuses on artworks that seek to rekindle our bond with the natural world as a means of developing new attitudes and sustainable ways of being. Different forms of care are made visible throughout the exhibition, whether through nurturing communities, tending to plants or joining protests.

Many of the artists foreground the interconnected nature of all beings and challenge us to engage and empathise with non-human perspectives. Some works highlight the voices of environmental activists; others underscore histories of industrial and chemical pollution, whilst illuminating ways in which the growing ecological crisis is entangled with social, economic and political spheres. There are also works that commemorate loss – of people, species, habitats – due to climate change or ecological degradation.

But in one way or another, all of the artworks in ‘Dear Earth’ inventively imagine an ethic of care and compassion. Mapping out an ecology of hope and spiritual connection, they seek to deepen our engagement with the subject in ways that ultimately nurture both our understanding and our capacity to act in support of our planet.

I don’t want to be negative, but I don’t really believe in any of that, in, for example, ‘an ecology of hope and spiritual connection’. This world, and our species, contains Vladimir Putin, the Wagner Group, Xi Jinping, Islamic State, Jair Bolsonaro. Mass murder and ecocide are arguably the distinguishing characteristics of our species.

On a more mundane level, most people think it is fine to own and drive a car. Me, I think it should be a criminal offence to own and drive a car, van, lorry, bus, coach, motorbike or scooter. They should be banned. Everyone should cycle or walk, maybe ride horses, a return to mid-Victorian horse and carts. Cities should be redesigned without ICE-powered vehicles so that people can live closer to their work. Flying should be banned, obviously.

Either we need to make complete and comprehensive and sweeping changes to our lifestyles, and as soon as possible, or we’re just going to carry on as usual. I am a climate radical, a climate extremist. We need to stop burning fossil fuels NOW.

I’m fully signed up to the cause. I don’t own a car, am never getting on a plane again, have been recycling everything for 30 years. In the 1990s my wife helped launch The Forest Stewardship Council which promotes responsible management of the world’s forests. Last year we planted half a dozen trees in our back garden, along with as many butterfly and bee-friendly plants as we could fit in, and each year let it run wild to encourage insects, with the result that we get lots of birds. Trivial, insignificant stuff, I know, but the best I can do.

So maybe that’s why I wasn’t very interested in ‘the message’ of many of the works here – because I’ve been discussing, debating and embodying the same ‘messages’ for decades. With the result that I barely scanned the wall labels telling me how awful capitalism is, or how ruinous the oil industry is, or how the Amazon is being devastated etc etc, the kind of thing I’ve been reading and worrying about since the 1980s.

My pre-existing commitment to the cause freed me up to enjoy the works purely as works of art, judged solely by the impact they made on all my senses.

I can see what the various artists are aiming at, I can read what they wish the world was like, I understand their desire for a more caring and compassionate approach – to ourselves, to each other, and to the natural world around us. But that’s not what the world is like, that’s not what we’re like. We are horribly heedless and destructive. We have to face the facts and act accordingly.

Anyway this, the green environmentalist subject matter, is not why I liked this exhibition; I liked it because a lot of the art is really bold and impactful (and staged in big, calming, air-conditioned spaces).

Top works

As I mentioned, there are:

• many excellent large photos – for example, of abandoned industrial plants by Richard Mosse (Ireland)
• prints – for example, a series of X-rays of living organisms by Agnes Denes (Hungary)
• big paintings – including a striking nude woman in a tribal style by Daiara Tukano

But what bowled me over were the installations.

1. ‘Memorial to Arcadia Woodlands Clear-Cut (Green, Violet, and Brown)’ by Andrea Bowers (2014)

The afore-mentioned ecofeminist Andrea Bowers made a big sculpture consisting of ropes or twines hanging from the ceiling, each ending with a fragment of wood. It’s entitled ‘Memorial to Arcadia Woodlands Clear-Cut (Green, Violet, and Brown)’. It commemorates a forest in California that Bowers attempted to save by climbing and tying herself to an oak tree alongside three other activists. The action failed to prevent the destruction of the pristine grove of trees and the protesters were arrested. Bowers later returned to the site, collecting the remaining wood chippings and connecting them with ropes and other tree-sitting gear to create this shrine. It is a ‘hanging sculpture’.

‘Memorial to Arcadia Woodlands Clear-Cut (Green, Violet, and Brown)’ by Andrea Bowers in ‘Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis’ at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by Mark Blower. Courtesy of the Hayward Gallery

2. ‘we are opposite like that’ by Himali Singh Soin (2018 to 2019)

This is splendid. The space it’s in is dark, no lights. There is a big video screen but instead of hanging on a wall it is standing upright in a big square pool of something. Because it’s dark I wondered if it was oil, a protest against the oil industry etc, but a visitor assistant told me it’s water, flat, cold, completely black water. And so it reflects the action of the video above it. You sit on a bench and watch the video and watch its perfect reflection in the icy black water beneath.

The video itself is a haunting, slow-moving sequence of the artist appearing in various guises, sometimes wearing those foil protective suits against the cold, in Arctic or Antarctic landscapes. Reading the wall label you discover that it is Soin herself and she is playing Ice, an alien figure navigating a polar landscape speckled with coal mines. The film is based on the Victorian fears that a new ice age would advance across the world and consume the British Empire.

So, apparently the artist is reflecting on this colonial past and ‘the reparative possibilities of the Earth’s polar regions as they become increasingly vulnerable in the midst of climate change.’ Maybe. But just as striking as the imagery is the confrontationally modernistic soundtrack an original score (by David Soin Tappeser – any relation?) performed by a string quartet. Apparently the splintered, pointillist fragments are meant to denote the sounds of ice crystals, shifting ice platforms, an eerie, unhuman landscape.

Installation view of ‘we are opposite like that’ by Himali Singh Soin in ‘Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis’ at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by Mark Blower. Courtesy of the Hayward Gallery

A photo can’t convey the impact of sitting in the dark, watching these beautiful images, hearing this jagged spooky music. There’s a video on YouTube of the artist introducing and explaining the piece, with a long extract starting at 3:44.

3. ‘Axis of Life and Vines in the Mountains’ by Aluaiy Kaumakan (2018)

Many of the rooms are such self-contained worlds or zones that they are separated by thick black curtains. You have to actively push through these to go from one artzone to another.

One of the best experiences in the show was pushing through some heavy black curtains into a big room to be confronted by this fabulous work, an enormous sculpture in multi-coloured fabric by Aluaiy Kaumakan. Kaumakan is not a rootless city-dweller but comes from a specific community within Taiwan. In 2009, a devastating typhoon forced the Indigenous Paiwan community to leave their mountain village in southern Taiwan. Kaumakan’s response to the disaster was to begin working collaboratively with other displaced women from her community, passing on the traditional Paiwan weaving techniques her mother had taught her. Apparently, the motifs and styles derives from Paiwan’s highly ornamented ceremonial dress, and Kaumakan combines natural fibres and recycled materials using the Paiwan technique of ‘lemikalik’, a process of binding fabric into cords looped in concentric circles.

This is all good to know but… wow! The piece is big and dramatic and strange and absorbing and mesmeric. I wandered off and came back twice, unable to tear myself away from its strange, and haunting power. Apparently, lemikalik can be translated as ‘intertwining’ and evokes both the joining of threads and the unbreakable bond between people and the land. I felt myself being drawn in, as in a science fiction film, into its strange, haunting, scary, huge, colourful world of skeins and ropes.

Installation view of ‘Axis of Life and Vines in the Mountains’ by Aluaiy Kaumakan in ‘Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis’ at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by Mark Blower. Courtesy of the Hayward Gallery

4. ‘Green Screen’ by Hito Steyerl (2023)

You push through another set of thick, heavy, black curtains into a completely different world. The Kaumakan room is light and bright but next second you are in a room which is dark as a cinema. You are immediately confronted with a wall of what appear to be lightbulbs which are continually flashing ever-changing patterns of changing colours. There’s a bench to sit on and bean bags to slump on. I playfully asked the visitor assistant if the installation included drugs – obviously only natural, organic, environmentally-friendly drugs, things like peyote or mescaline. Apparently not. Shame. It’s screaming out for psychedelic enhancement.

Installation view of ‘Green Screen’ by Hito Steyerl in ‘Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis’ at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by Mark Blower. Courtesy of the Hayward Gallery

But it is, obviously, not just a nightclub-style lightshow. It is an LED screen constructed from empty bottles and crates. When you go round the back you realise that plants, rubber plants, houseplants, are growing out of each of these bottles (‘a living wall of plants’). Now here’s the thing: bioelectrical signals from plants have been converted into the sounds and images displayed on the LED wall, with each bottle acting as a single pixel! So the ever-changing visual patterns (and the bleeps and tweeks which you hear) are generated by the living plants. Cool, eh.

5. Pabellón de Cristal I by Cristina Iglesi (2014)

Up the Brutalist concrete stairs you come across another wonder. This photo doesn’t do it justice.

Installation view of ‘Pabellón de Cristal I’ by Cristina Iglesi (2014) in ‘Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis’ at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by Mark Blower. Courtesy of the Hayward Gallery

What happens is you walk up the concrete steps into something that resembles the steam room at my local gym, a square space with a (green) bench lining 3 sides and which you’re obviously meant to sit and rest on. But what makes it magical is the ‘floor’ is actually a metal grid under which is an uneven wrinkled brown surface, which looks like solidified lava flow, and across the multiple runnels and crevices of this surface is gurgling an abundance of real water. Actual flowing water, in an art gallery! The wall label gives a copious explanation:

The green glass room, benches and the grid floor affect the viewer’s perception of space, creating a sense of instability, while the increasing speed of the water draining away makes the passing of time more visible. Iglesias wants us to slow down and think about where we are standing. The land under our feet is an accumulation of different strata of rock and sediment, but also of layers of culture and memory, which are often overlooked. For the artist, consciousness of this stratification and how our planet is formed reveals our need to care for nature and the environment. ‘I want people to be aware that we’ve constructed the road and under that road, there’s a water system and there are also wider waters coming from deeper back in time,’ she explains.

Maybe. For me, as I mentioned, because the exhibition was incredibly empty meant that on the two separate occasions when I entered the Pabellon, I sat for a couple of minutes, I was completely alone. I put down my bag and notebook and pen and glasses and sat back against the green wall and closed my eyes and listened to the gurgling water and felt really, really chilled.

6. The Living Pyramid by Agnes Denes (2015/2024)

In one sense, the best is saved for last. Further along the corridor, you open double doors into the biggest display space in the Hayward, the Anna and Michael Zanni Gallery. And smack bang in the centre of this huge white open space, lit by skylights in the ceiling, sits the enormous Living Pyramid by Agnes Denes.

Installation view of ‘The Living Pyramid’ by Agnes Denes in ‘Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis’ at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by Mark Blower. Courtesy of the Hayward Gallery

Denes is, apparently a leading pioneer of the environmental art movement, well known for creating outdoor works that engage with nature ever since the 1960s. She is perhaps best known for ‘Wheatfield – A Confrontation’ where she sowed, tended and harvested two acres of wheat on a landfill site beside the World Trade Centre in New York, and there are big colour photos of that and other similar works on the walls. But it’s obviously this dirty great pyramid lined with plants which grabs your attention.

The Living Pyramid was first shown in 2015 at Socrates Sculpture Park in New York and has become one of Denes’s iconic works, with versions appearing in Germany and Turkey. This is the first time it’s been shown indoors and this most recent iteration reaches five metres in height and showcases a flourishing selection of wildflowers and grasses. They include, for the gardeners among you, Calamagrostis, Deschampsia, Echinacea, Festuca, Helenium, Pennisetum, Rudbeckia and Veronica.

Obviously it’s meant to be saying something about the hierarchy of power in modern society and is probably a statement against capitalism or some such – but it’s also just a really impressive, big artefact, makes a awesome impression on the senses, is amusing and uplifting to walk around or to go up close and examine the plants.

However, at this point you notice something quite ironic, which is that quite a few of these carefully spaced and arranged plants are dying. I asked the visitor assistant if they’re getting enough water, because the soil around them (lovely compost-y soil, not like the heavy London clay soil in my garden) seemed very dry. This led him to tell me that the curators did at one point consider putting the whole thing outside, on the terrace just outside the Anna and Michael Zanni Gallery. That way it would have got natural sunlight and the showers which we’ve been getting here in London recently. He doesn’t know why they decided to stick it inside. There are skylights in the ceiling of the gallery, so the plants get some daylight but, by the looks of things, not enough. And not enough water.

I don’t know whether Denes intended this, for her work to be a pyramid of dying plants? Is that deliberate? Some kind of irony? It certainly raises the problem of creating works of art about ‘nature’ and displaying them in any art gallery because art galleries must be among the most sterile, antiseptic locations in the modern world. Clean, dry, air-conditioned and antiseptic in the highest degree to ensure the complete safety of priceless works of art.

Nature is dirty, messy, full of animals crapping everywhere, fungi and mould and spores and insects eating away at wood and dirty, unhygienic ecosystems everywhere you look. There is a profound contradiction between the messy world of nature and the spic and span world of art. This exhibition goes further than others I’ve been to, to try and address this gap. The very first display is a dirty great big fallen tree incorporated into a sculpture by Otobong Nkanga. But it is, characteristically, dead.

Installation view of ‘The Trifurcation’ by Otobong Nkanga (2023) in ‘Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis’ at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by Mark Blower. Courtesy of the Hayward Gallery

I loved the Pabellón de Cristal with its real water, but the surface it was swirling across was completely lifeless resin moulding. The bottle bank LED had plants in it, but they weren’t the thing you noticed.

Anyway, the apparent ‘failure’ of the Living Pyramid highlights questions the ability of art to be genuinely fertile and full of life. Must art always be sterile and arid?

Videos

In addition to the wonderful Himali Singh Soin video, there are at least three other videos, all projected onto huge screens and so immersive experiences in their own right. Two stood out:

Grid (Palimi-ú) by Richard Mosse

In a big darkened room is a very widescreen projection of a series of poignant speeches by Yanomami people recorded on analogue 35mm infrared film in the village of Palimi-ú, near the Brazil-Venezuela border. On the wall adjacent is projected a series of images, multispectral photographs captured by drones flying over sites of environmental crimes in the rainforest. The aim is to’ document the impact of illegal mining and agribusiness in the Amazon’. Alas, the Amazon.

THE FUTURE (Sixes and Sevens) by Cornelia Parker (2023)

This is one of the seven works commissioned specially for this exhibition. In a darkened room are two massive video screens on which are projected primary school children answering questions about what they imagine their future will be like. After a while you realise the two screens are showing different kids answering the same question or raising other thoughts. In other words, out of this simply material is created a kind of polyphony. (The title is a reference to the very famous [if you’re me and Cornelia’s age] 1964 TV documentary ‘Seven Up!’ in which 7-year-olds were asked what they wanted to be when they grew up.) Watching kids is sweet and touching and maybe speaks to the exhibition’s theme of care and compassion. Doesn’t get us off the hook of doing something, though – doing something radical, now.

Installation view of ‘THE FUTURE (Sixes and Sevens)’ by Cornelia Parker in ‘Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis’ at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by Mark Blower. Courtesy of the Hayward Gallery

Last tweet

Outside on the terrace are two works by the American artist Jenny Kendler. One is the rather scary sculpture, ‘Birds Watching III’, made up of paintings of the eyes of one hundred bird species that are threatened by the climate crisis. They are printed onto the reflective material used for traffic signs to give a sheeny, reflective and spooky effect.

More user friendly, child friendly, even, is the piece, ‘Tell it to the Birds’. This consists of half a ball or drum erected on a tripod and which you lean into to discover a microphone sitting nestled among a bed of foam. The idea is that you should say something into the microphone and… instead of your voice booming out across the rooftops, a savvy software ‘translates’ your words into birdsong. the software contains the calls of a load of endangered bird species and whatever you say will be ‘converted’ into tweets and calls. To quote the wall label:

These songs are broadcast for all to hear, yet only the speaker knows their true meaning. Driven by a desire to ‘re-enchant’ our relationship with the natural world, Kendler asks us to imagine what interspecies communication could sound like.

Installation view of ‘Tell it to the Birds’ by Jenny Kendler in ‘Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis’ at the Hayward Gallery. You can see ‘Birds Watching III’ reflected in the window. Photo by Mark Blower. Courtesy of the Hayward Gallery

Obviously this is nothing whatsoever like what ‘interspecies communication could sound like’ but it’s a fun way to end a wonderfully inventive, big, immersive and enthralling exhibition. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

What can I do?

A few years ago UN Climate Envoy Christiana Figueres made a short list of things everyone should do, must do, right now:

• give up meat
• give up dairy
• sell your car
• never fly again
• move any savings or investments you have from fossil fuel-supporting companies to sustainable, decarbonised investments

And plant trees. Lots and lots of trees. How many of these have you done? How many of these has anybody done?

Related links

• Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis continues @ the Hayward Gallery until 3 September 2023
• ‘Dear Earth’ is just part of the South Bank’s extensive Planet Summer season
• Profile of Cornelia Parker where she discusses Sixes and Sevens, in the Financial Times
• Eco-Visionaries: confronting a planet in a state of emergency @ the Royal Academy (January 2020)

Other Hayward Gallery reviews

• More Hayward Gallery reviews