LOOK Climate Lab 2024 at Open Eye Gallery
Maja Lorkowska, Exhibitions Editor
LOOK Climate Lab is back! The biennial programme explores how photography can be a relevant and powerful medium for talking about climate change. It consists of numerous photography projects on display as well as events and workshops that take place over the course of LOOK so you’re guaranteed to find something that will be of interest.
Taking place at Open Eye Gallery, the space is transformed into a lab to bring together like-minded people, from researchers to artists, to experiment and test their ideas. The programme is the perfect opportunity to discuss the systemic changes that are necessary in order to begin to tackle the climate crisis.
Downstairs, Galleries 1 and 2 focus on the topics of rewilding and industrial heritage, growing food and regenerative farming, transport and pollution, capitalist production and impacts of war. Gallery 3 is temporarily a cinema showing short films about grassroots initiatives such as community growing, sustainable building and gardening to promote mental health.
LOOK Climate Lab also hosts the launch of We Feed The UK – an initiative that uses storytelling to inspire support for regenerative agriculture. As a result, We Feed the UK commissioned ten photographers to document ten regenerative farm stories in different regions of the country.
Other projects on display include Erosion by Stephanie Wynne, which explores how the rubble resulting from the Second World War was disposed of or used. Have we learned anything since then? The artist questions whether post-war ‘waste’ can be reused, recycled and reduced.
Photographer Nazar Furyk has been visiting the Kherson region of Ukraine over the past year. His images from the Kherson project don’t record direct conflict but the overpowering atmosphere and tension of it.
LOOK Climate Lab is an ambitious and important event that utilises photography to draw attention to the most pressing environmental issues. As described by Max Gorbatskyi, Open Eye Gallery’s curator: “When taking a photograph today, it is probable that you capture a result or a cause of the climate crisis since its manifestations are ubiquitously around us. Photography is capable of registering and representing, being essentially a trace itself.”
All events are free to attend and there’s so much to choose from – talks, poetry readings, workshops and more!
