<div><p><strong><em><a></a></em></strong></p><p>From Iceland to Bangladesh, a new kind of weather station is mapping out the stark effects of climate change</p></div><p><strong></strong></p>

Skye Sherwin

Artists take the earth’s temperature for the World Weather Network 

<p>Climate change is the most pressing issue of our time, but it’s a subject on which artists and writers have been slow starters. ‘The natural world has always been their territory,’ explains Michael Morris, co-director of London-based art organization Artangel, on an unseasonably warm winter day in London. ‘Yet they haven’t been part of the climate conversation in the way they might be. We wanted to combine the knowledge of scientists and the imagination of artists. That’s what was missing.’</p><p>It was during the pandemic lockdowns that Morris and fellow co-director James Lingwood first came up with the idea of creating artists’ weather stations – location-specific artworks and activities delving into climate data. Yet, they quickly ran into one of the subject’s great challenges: the sheer scale of climate change, and its diffuse causes and symptoms. Their initial plan had been to form stations around the United Kingdom, but soon realized that this scheme fell short. ‘Weather is local; climate is global,’ explains Lingwood. ‘The one thing it isn’t is national.’<strong></strong></p>

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	Their solution was to pass the conceptual and curatorial torch to an expansive web of artists and institutions in 27 countries, which together form the World Weather Network: a series of regional, climate-focused artworks, exhibitions, talks, and seminars unfolding in 2023. At the Network’s core is an online hub on which projects can be experienced without the environmental cost of shipping or travel. Truly vast in its reach, the project includes well-known names like&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/6767/Liam-Gillick" target="_blank">Liam Gillick</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7738/Katie-Paterson" target="_blank">Katie Paterson</a>, and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/8466/Hiroshi-Sugimoto" target="_blank">Hiroshi Sugimoto</a>, as well as under-the-radar artist collectives, poets, musicians, dancers, writers, and scientists, with many contributors working far from art’s usual commercial or institutional centers. And, while there will be reports from countries feeling some of climate change’s worst effects to date – Bangladesh, Iraq, and the Philippines, to mention a few – Lingwood points out that the Network also includes many sites in Europe, such as the Netherlands, Portugal, and the UK. ‘It was important to include places that might not be considered on the front line as well as places closer to the poles, the deep north or south,’ says Lingwood. ‘We share the responsibility.’
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	One strand to emerge across these far-flung enterprises is the importance of nonhuman witnesses. At the Seoul Weather Station, Art Sonje Center, artists&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/23963/Moon-KYUNGWON" target="_blank">Moon Kyungwon</a> and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/57761/Jeon-Joonho" target="_blank">Jeon Joonho</a> have created an AI-scripted film exploring environmental change from the perspective of a millennia-old stone. A group of artists and writers at the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation in France, meanwhile, have worked with an unusual group of weather reporters: lichens.
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<p>Water is another strand, and perhaps the most important among the Network’s many projects. ‘The earth is heating up fast,’ says Lingwood, ‘and that often manifests in what’s happening with water – frozen water, melting water, the lack of water.’ Frequently, it is icebergs that sound alarms. With milder winters, each year they make an earlier appearance and in fewer numbers down Iceberg Alley, the portion of the Atlantic Ocean along the coasts of Newfoundland and Labrador. On nearby Fogo Island, Gillick has created a shelter inspired by fishermen’s huts, in which locals and scientists can investigate the weather. In New Zealand, glaciologist Heather Purdie is working with artists at Haupapa glacier, who are drawing on Maori mythology to give context to environmental changes. According to Maori beliefs, Rakamaomao, god of the wind, formed the glacier with his frozen breath. Now that it’s melting, the divine breath is being exhaled into the atmosphere again.</p>

<p>It's also striking how artworks themselves have become unintentional memorials and evidence of the climate crisis. A 2007 Artangel project,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7642/Roni-Horn" target="_blank">Roni Horn</a>’s<em> Library of Water</em> in Iceland, catalogues samples from local glaciers. ‘There might be a time when we have to rename it the museum of water,’ Morris says. Although it was created in 1970,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/13263/Robert-Smithson" target="_blank">Robert Smithson</a>’s iconic <em>Spiral Jetty</em> is also part of the Network. The entropy that this iconic Earth Work intended to enact has been a faster process than Smithson may have envisaged: Utah’s 22-year, climate breakdown-induced ‘megadrought’ has decimated the Great Salt Lake in which it sits.</p>

<p>One charge levied at artists who make consciousness-raising work is, inevitably, what purpose can their efforts serve that activism doesn’t? For Morris, a crucial role that artists and writers take on is that of bearing witness, to be ‘more reflective and less reactive’. ‘The only answer is that we need everything,’ adds Lingwood. ‘We need science, but climate scientists say that is not enough. The information has been in the world for decades. Think of what is needed as an orchestra, with all these different elements working together. The activists and the artists are creating a different kind of sound.’</p><hr /><p>Over the next six months, Art Basel Stories will spotlight several World Weather Network projects in more depth as they evolve and change – like the weather. Stay tuned for updates.</p><p>Skye Sherwin is an art writer based in Rochester, UK. She contributes regularly to <em>The Guardian</em> and numerous art publications.</p><p>Published on January 11, 2023.</p><p>Captions for full-bleed images, from top to bottom: 1. Moon Kyungwon &amp; Jeon Joonho, <em>To Build a Fire</em>, 2022 (film still). 2. A view of lichens in Grasse, France. Artists: Nolan Oswald Dennis, Joana Escoval, Rindon Johnson, Joel Kuennen, Jakob Kudsk Steensen. With the special contribution of Infrasonica (Eloisa Travaglini, Pablo José Ramírez, and Sam Simon). Commissioned by Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation. 3. Robert Smithson, <em>Spiral Jetty, </em>1970 (detail). Great Salt Lake, Utah. &copy; Holt/Smithson Foundation and Dia Art Foundation, Artist Rights Society, New York.</p>

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