Representing the Climate Crisis: Aesthetic Framings in Contemporary Performing and Visual Arts

This chapter reviews the representation of climate change in performing and visual arts over the past ten years, canvassing the aesthetic exploration of the climate emergency in selected international works by surveying emergent narrative themes, key dramaturgical shifts and aesthetic strategies. Discussing the limitations of anthropocentric conventions, it investigates innovative approaches and their capability to generate knowledge about the dynamics of Earth processes and humanity’s embeddedness and interference with them. Looking to novel experimental work currently in development at The University of New South Wales (UNSW)’s iCinema Research Centre, we speculate how these emergent aesthetics may be further developed to augment the arts’s capability to deepen insight and strengthen preparedness in a rapidly transforming world.