Slow Violence

About

Working across film, photography, installation and sculpture, the contributing artists challenge us to rethink the prevailing climate change iconography - of melting ice caps or desertification.  Rejecting the spectacular and immediate for disasters that are slow moving and long-term, their visual interpretations often draw attention to what is happening closer to home, within our own local environments.

Presented in collaboration with the School of Creative Arts across an exhibition, symposium and other events, Slow Violence takes its name and impetus from Rob Nixon’s seminal book ‘Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor’ (2013).  Nixon suggests we reject the idea of violence as explosive or sensational, and instead “engage a different kind of violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive.” Slow Violence acknowledges that the violence of climate change can often be unrecognized, even invisible, incremental, localized, extended, durational.

The Slow Violence exhibition, symposium and events were developed collaboratively by UHGalleries and the Contemporary Art Practice Group, School of Creative Arts, University of Hertfordshire.