- By CYNTHIA LUM
Josh Kline’s Climate Change at MOCA is both an exhibition and a total work of art—an ambitious, immersive 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 five years, Kline’s eponymous project will be brought together for the first time for this exhibition, mobilizing sculpture, moving image work, photography, and ephemeral materials to completely transform the galleries of MOCA Grand Avenue.
Kline’s vision of the world we live in and the future is grim. Climate Change is a visceral, charged work of 21st-century expanded cinema. In this vision, which could be called dystopian but in truth is terrifyingly near, a catastrophic sea-level rise has inundated the world’s coasts, unleashing a flood of hundreds of millions traumatized refugees. What happens in a world where the systems built to sustain and extend capitalist enterprise and global hegemony melt down their own foundations? Kline opens the door to such a future, inviting us to place ourselves within it and consider the rear view.
There’s war, displacement, drought, famine, rising seas, flooding faster winds, and a frightening U.N report suggests irrevocable, possibly humanity-ending results if we can’t reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 100 percent of 2010 levels by 2050. Artist Josh Kline wants to give us a vision of this un-future
On view at MOCA until January 5, 2025. For more, click here.
