UCLA Art|Sci Center+Lab to host FEMINIST CLIMATE CHANGE at the 2017 Ars Electronica Festival!

UCLA Professor Victoria Vesna, Director of the UCLA Art|Sci Center, is bound for the Ars Electronica festival, taking place in Austria from September 7-11, 2017. Along with Xin Xin, a recent alum of UCLA’s Design and Media Arts program, Vesna is curating Feminist Climate Change, an exhibit of work by UCLA alumni artists, which will be on view throughout the festival.

Vesna described the project in a recent interview for the Ars Electronica Blog:

“The goal is to present a different viewpoint and make a case that genuine Environmentalism is by default Feminism. In other words, if you truly care about your environment, no matter if you are male, female or in between – you will by default respectful of women. This explains why there are so many women in biology and it makes one wonder about physics and engineering – could it be that they are somehow disconnected from natural systems too much?

Everything in nature is about BALANCE and DIVERSITY. In turn everything that is happening in our society and the environment is a direct reflection of our world being out of balance. When you have a group of men deciding what a woman’s right is in relation to her body, you know that chances are high that they would be equally inconsiderate of the Earth we all live in.

I believe that we are in the midst of climate change on many levels and the title of the exhibition is deliberately provocative. The sciences clearly spelled out the danger of fossil fuels but is so deeply intertwined with the very system that supports this that dialogue becomes key – we will not survive in bubbles. We have to move away from the industrial age, separation of the sciences from the arts and humanities along with the reductionist methodologies that no longer work in an ever more complex world.”

Read the full interview here.