Leanne Bell Gonczarow’s PhD research engages her multi-disciplinary art practice to question what role photographic processes can perform in relation to the climate-crisis, investigating how photography can expand beyond its current use in the media as a tool for documenting the landscape in crisis. Specifically, she is considering the hypothesis that the rate of global warming is exponentially increasing due to a significant reduction in the reflection of the sun’s rays (photons) from the surface of melting white-ice back out to space, and linking this ecological reality to the recording of reflected light through the photographic process. 

For SAR 2020 Leanne will present video documentation of the act of painting an ice-cube black.* The work could be considered a response to Karen Barad’s call (in Posthumanist Performativity) for a ‘performative alternative to representationalism’ (2008). If we consider photography primarily as a representational practice, specifically when tasked to image the climate-crisis, it could be said that it gets ‘caught up in the geometrical optics of reflection where, much like the infinite play of images between two facing mirrors, the epistemological gets bounced back and forth, but nothing more is seen’. (Barad 2008) 

The performative act of attempting to eliminate the reflective capacity of an ice-cube alludes to the reduction in the terrestrial reflection of photons off the ice-sheets and situates this remote, global phenomenon on an intimate, local, domestic scale – inviting a diffractive analysis. How does this somewhat Sisyphean gesture foreground questions of ontology, materiality and agency and in doing so contribute to our conceptualisation of climate-change and its material processes?

Click here to view the remains of this cancelled presentation on Research Catalogue