Josephine Berry. Planetary Realism: Art Against Apocalypse
Book presentation: Josephine Berry in conversation with Martin Conrads
Planetary Realism tackles the question of contemporary art’s relationship to the climate emergency and environmental collapse, asking how its qualities and powers have a distinct role to play in the crisis, as well as thinking through its historical entanglement with the forces of capitalist globalisation that have led to it.
If ‘planet’ is a word for the irreducible realm that underlies the extractivist fantasy of the globe, then ‘planetary realism’ becomes a way of seeing that challenges capitalist realism. The devastation left in the wake of modernity and globalization is revealing a fragile and unfamiliar planet, and humanity is awakening to this new real. If the old “realist” tools of objectivism have contributed to capitalist society’s divorce from the natural world how, Berry asks, are artists finding new ways to really see and draw into appearance an underlying, if allusive, planetary real.
Josephine Berry is an art theorist, former editor of Mute magazine, and Tutor at the Royal College of Art as well as lecturer at Goldsmiths. Her first monograph is Art and (Bare) Life: A Biopolitical Inquiry, Sternberg Press, 2019
Martin Conrads is a journalist, critic and picture editor and currently teaches design courses at Weißensee Academy of Art Berlin and at HTW Berlin.
Josephine Berry
Planetary Realism: Art Against Apocalypse
Designed by Wolfe Hall
Sternberg Press 2025
The presentation will be held in English.
