Exhibition

Sustainability Art Prize 2020

4 May 2020 – 31 May 2020

Regular hours

Monday
Closed
Tuesday
10:00 – 18:00
Wednesday
10:00 – 18:00
Thursday
10:00 – 18:00
Friday
10:00 – 18:00
Saturday
10:00 – 18:00
Sunday
10:00 – 18:00

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Ruskin Gallery

Cambridge, United Kingdom

Event map

The Sustainability Art Prize (SAP) is an annual event organised at Anglia Ruskin University. Every year students from across the departments of the Cambridge School of Art and the Cambridge School of Creative Industries submit works responding to themes of sustainability.

About

SAP offers a space for investigations around climate change, deforestation, habitat loss, species extinction, use of natural resources, ocean acidification and pollution, loss of biodiversity, human behaviour and social, climate and ecological justice. The themes are vast, complex and interconnected and this year the participants have produced works that address these issues head on. Students have responded to these issues by exploring the entanglement of accelerating consumption, investigating the extractive methods of relating to the world. As a result of these investigations, they have created works that incite thinking about these complexities in ecological terms and that encourage imagining that new worlds are possible.  

Echoing how the issues addressed are linked, the exhibition provides an opportunity to meditate about interconnectivity as methodology. As each student addresses the topic from the perspective of their own discipline (photography, fashion design, illustration, book art, interior design, printmaking, fine art and music and sound), the exhibition as a whole provides a wide range of experiences from where to think new thoughts and to world new worlds. 

In her theories about co-evolution, Lynn Margulis introduced the idea that what sustains life is not about the survival of the fittest but rather a web of complex interspecies collaborations instead. Cooperation and connectivity seem to be not only the norm for living well together, but also the key to enhance our abilities to transform the web of relations and our capacities to create new beneficial entanglements.

Together, these works provide a comprehensive comment on sustainability’s complexity and interconnectedness, investigating themes of sustainability across boundaries and asking how to move beyond the centrality of the human scale. Seen as a whole, this exhibition does something remarkable: it speaks about working together. Drawing from artistic practice as reparative resistance and cooperative courage, this exhibition widens the conversation by digging deep into the spectator’s sense of resolve to bring about change. 

With their works, the students encourage us to question a system that takes more than can be replenished and they point out that sustainable development and respect and conservation of nature go hand in hand. The new stories that these students dare to tell and the questions they dare to ask aim at disputing how globalised economic and political systems are kept in place. The students boldly spell out the current ecological crisis, and actively invite us to imagine change by questioning the very core of our belief systems: the idea of how the planet is made fruitful. 

Artists such as Gustav Metzger have said that artists and creatives need to take a stand against ecological breakdown and the ongoing erasure of other species. It is our privilege and duty to be at the forefront of the fight against social and ecological injustices and SAP 2020 is an example of what can be achieved when creatives work together.

Taking part

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