Art and Oceanic Climate Change: Entangled Currents

By: Jeffery, Celina

Art and Oceanic Climate Change: Entangled Currents examines how contemporary artists and curators make the often imperceptible processes of oceanic climate change tangible, situated, and resonant. Moving across Arctic, Pacific, Atlantic, and Gulf Coast contexts, the book traces the effects of melting ice, rising seas, disappearing coastlines, toxic waters, damaged reefs, storms, and nuclear and petrochemical legacies. It argues that these transformations cannot be separated from colonialism, racial capitalism, militarization, extraction, displacement, and unequal exposure to environmental harm.

Rather than treating art as an illustration of climate science, this book approaches artistic practice as a form of inquiry and knowledge-making. Through close analysis of artworks, exhibitions, materials, and community-grounded practices, it develops the concept of "oceanic witnessing" embodied and ethically situated ways of perceiving and responding to environmental change. Four recurring currents--memory, transformation, contamination, and care and repair--connect distinct places without erasing their histories, sovereignties, and knowledge systems. These practices invite attention not only to questions of representation, but also to how the climate crisis becomes felt, understood, and collectively contested. The book considers how contemporary art approaches the ocean as an active medium through which species, materials, histories, violence, and futures circulate, while opening possibilities for resistance, responsibility, survival, and reparative imagination.

The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history and environmental humanities.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1032734507
• ISBN13: 9781032734507
• Release Date: February 2027
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 172 Pages