The film projects, installations, photographs, and drawings of Oliver Ressler (*1970 in Knittelfeld / Austria, lives and works in Vienna) illuminate the mechanisms and potential of worldwide protests. The interdisciplinary research project Barricading the Ice Sheets (2019–2023) chronicles the mobilizations of climate activists through their activities, gatherings, and working sessions and presents different approaches and methods for an artistic-activist practice. In his works, Ressler takes a stand on the problem of increasing carbon emissions and accompanies civil disobedience activities that illuminate the inseparability of environmental issues and sociopolitical as well as economic conditions. The corresponding cycle of solo exhibitions, also titled Barricading the Ice Sheets, brings together pieces produced within the overarching framework of the project. From June 2 to July 31, 2022 several installations and film projects, including new productions, were on view in the exhibition Oliver Ressler. Barricading the Ice Sheets at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein.

The publication Oliver Ressler. Barricading the Ice Sheets, published in July 2023, presents the project in detail by means of numerous text contributions as well as comprehensive photo documentations and emphasizes the complexity of the climate crisis in its proliferating manifestations. Besides the artist himself, Andreas Malm, T. J. Demos, Ameli M. Klein, Kodwo Eshun, Doreen Mende, Toni Negri, Marco Baravalle, Pujita Guha, Anja Steidinger, and Nora Sternfeld contributed essays to the volume.

Participants

Oliver Ressler studied at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. In 2016, he was awarded the Prix Thun for Art and Ethics (Switzerland) and, in 2002, the International Media Art Prize of the Center for Art and Media (ZKM), Karlsruhe / Germany. Ressler’s expansive cinematic oeuvre has been presented at numerous civic movement events, art institutions, and film festivals.

Doreen Mende is a curator, theorist, currently associate professor of curatorial/politics of the CCC RP research-based Master at Haut école d’art et design, Geneva / Switzerland, and since 2021 director of the cross-collections research department of the Dresden State Collections of Art (SKD) where she initiated the Stannaki Forum on diasporic knowledge. Recent projects include Decolonizing Socialism Entangled Internationalism, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, with The Missed Seminar as curatorial iteration at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, and SKD. She is a co-founder of the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin.