Oliver Ressler

No Future is cancelled

Visual Art Forum | Spring 2021
March 2, 2021 | 9:30 AM | FREE | Zoom

Please join us for a FREE talk by Oliver Ressler, "No Future is cancelled," presented as part of the Spring 2021 Visual Art Forum.

The Audain Visual Artist in Residence (AVAIR) and the School for the Contemporary Arts (SCA) are pleased to announce the Spring 2021 Visual Art Forum, a term-long series of free online public lectures by a diverse group of leading contemporary artists and thinkers. The Visual Art Forum is presented as part of the SCA’s AVAIR program and forms a central element of our studio and seminar classes.

In response to COVID-19, all AVAIR participants will be presenting lectures, conducting studio visits, and interacting with students and faculty of the SCA online. Members of the visual arts and cultural communities and the general public are invited to watch the main lecture series.

Biography

Oliver Ressler is an artist and filmmaker whose work has focused on global warming as a central theme. One of his first solo exhibitions was “100 Years of Greenhouse Effect” at Salzburger Kunstverein (1996). Several exhibitions, films, installations, billboards and photographic works on the theme have followed since then.

Ressler will talk about these works, putting a cycle of films – Everything's coming together while everything's falling apart (2016 – 2020) – at the center of the presentation. This cycle includes Everything's coming together while everything's falling apart: Code Rood and Everything's coming together while everything's falling apart: The ZAD. These films follow the climate justice movement in its struggles to dismantle an economic system heavily dependent on fossil fuels. It records key events for the climate justice movement in Europe, focusing in particular on events of mass civil disobedience.

Oliver Ressler lives and works in Vienna. He produces installations, projects in public space, and films on issues such as economics, democracy, migration, the climate catastrophe, forms of resistance and social alternatives.

He has had comprehensive solo exhibitions at Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo – CAAC, Seville; Wyspa Institute of Art, Gdansk; Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz; MNAC – National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest; SALT Galata, Istanbul and currently at Cultural Centre of Belgrade.

Ressler has participated in more than 400 group exhibitions, including Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven; MASSMoCA, North Adams, USA; the biennials in Prague (2005), Seville (2006), Moscow (2007), Taipei (2008), Lyon (2009), Venice (2013), Quebec (2014), Jeju (2017), Kyiv (2017), Gothenburg (2019), Stavanger (2019), and at Documenta 14, Kassel, 2017 (exhibition organized by EMST).

Ressler currently works on “Barricading the Ice Sheets”, a research project on the climate justice movement, funded by the Austrian Science Fund.

He was the first prize winner of the Prix Thun for Art and Ethics Award in 2016.

www.ressler.at

About the AVAIR Program

The Visual Art Forum is organized by Kathy Slade in collaboration with SCA Visual Art faculty Sabine Bitter, Raymond Boisjoly, Elspeth Pratt, and Judy Radul.

The Audain Visual Artist in Residence program brings artists and practitioners to Vancouver who have contributed significantly to the field of contemporary art and whose work resonates with local and international visual art discourses. The visiting artists interact with the students and faculty of the School for the Contemporary Arts as well as the broader visual arts and cultural communities. The program is generously funded by the Audain Foundation Endowment Fund.

The School for the Contemporary Arts recognizes that we are on the unceded and occupied territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.