Planet B

Nicolas Bourriaud invites artists from all around the world to question the contemporaneity of the romantic concept of the sublime, at the age of the anthropocene.

The awareness of climate change modified our collective relation to the earth in many ways, but it also impacted the human gaze. Within this context, the romantic notion of the sublime has been given a new turn: based on the relation between humans and nature, defined as a feeling of "delight associated with terror" and by the contrast between immensity and the individual, the sublime is the aesthetic notion that corresponds to the anthropocene.
In Planet B. Climate Change and the New Sublime, French writer and curator Nicolas Bourriaud invites artists from all around the world to question the contemporaneity of this concept through 3 chapters unfolding in 3 acts of the exhibition: 1. Intercessions (Every exhibition is a forest). 2. Charles Darwin and the coral reefs. 3. The tragic death of Nauru Island.

Planet B. Climate Change and the New Sublime is the last chapter of exhibitions initiated with The Great Acceleration. Art in the Anthropocene (Taipei Biennial, 2014), followed by Crash Test. The Molecular Turn (La Panacée, 2018) and The 7th continent (Istanbul Biennial, 2019).
This catalogue is published on the occasion of an eponymous exhibition taking place at Palazzo Bollani, Venice, from April 20th to November 27th, 2022, with Nils Alix-Tabeling, Dana-Fiona Armour, Charles Avery, Gianfranco Baruchello, Hicham Berrada, Bianca Bondi, Peter Buggenhout, Roberto Cabot, Alex Cerveny, Anna Conway, Sterling Crispin, Kendell Geers, Anna Bella Geiger, Loris Gréaud, Max Hooper Schneider, Agata Ingarden, Per Kirkeby, Agnieszka Kurant, Romana Londi, Turiya Magadlela, Lucia Pizzani, Thiago Rocha Pitta, Ylva Snöfrid, Nicolás Uriburu, Ambera Wellmann, Haegue Yang, Phillip Zach.