Today, we’re celebrating Earth Day, an annual event that promotes environmental protection. First celebrated in 1970, the movement annually mobilises 1 billion people across 190 countries towards taking positive climate action. The 2026 theme is Our Power, Our Planet, reflecting the fundamental truth that “environmental progress doesn’t depend on any single administration or election. It’s sustained by daily actions of communities, educators, workers and families protecting where they work and live.” It’s an admirable aim, often reflected in the work of artists and creatives around the world. We’re spotlighting five exhibition that highlight the beauty of our environment, as well as the urgent need of conservation.
Water has long operated as both mirror and medium in contemporary art, a site where aesthetics meet ethics and where planetary narratives unfold with unsettling clarity. In the context of climate crisis, the ocean becomes a charged archive, recording histories of extraction, exploration and ecological fragility. Julian Charrière’s multimedia works in Midnight Zone consistently combine art, environment and science. The exhibition highlights not only the sensual and metaphorical aspects associated with water but also a number of the political issues that surround it, such as water pollution and acidification, the melting of glaciers and polar ice caps due to the human activity, and the threat to the seabed posed by deep-sea mining. Here, audiences are invited to reflect on what we are doing to our most precious resource.
As the environmental crisis accelerates, artists around the world are responding with urgency, insight and vision. Future Geographies: Art in the Century of Climate Change is the first major exhibition in Canada to examine the intersection of the climate crisis and contemporary art on a global scale. Featuring works from the past 25 years, this exhibition underscores the urgency and relevance of sustainability and the environment as defining issues of our time. More than 35 works across a range of media – from large-scale video installations to living sculptures – invite viewers to confront pressing questions about our shared future on this planet and how we can help preserve it. Audiences will experience work by Teresita Fernández, Josh Kline, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Jean Shin, John Akonfrah and Clarissa Tossin.
“The future doesn’t rush over us like water. It’s not something that happens to us. It’s an act of creation. It’s something we make, moment by moment, together.” Liam Young is a BAFTA-nominated film maker, artist, and speculative futurist. His first major UK solo exhibition, hosted at the Barbican Centre in London, unfolds through an array of bold and wondrous films. They are presented on LED walls and as huge scale projections, as well as audio stories, set design, costumes, movie miniatures, graphic narratives and speculative artefacts. Young’s practice operates in the spaces between design, fiction and futures, creating speculative worlds and visionary films, which act as rehearsals for the world to come, where fiction becomes a tool for navigating the environmental urgencies we collectively face in the years to come.
Tiina Itkonen has been documenting Arctic regions, including the people and nature of Greenland, for nearly 30 years. Anori presents images from Itkonen’s career, during which she has travelled more than 1,500 kilometres along Greenland’s west coast by dog sled, fishing boats, sailing vessels, oil tankers, cargo ships and helicopters, spending extended periods in villages getting to know local people. The pictures follow her subjects as they grow into adults, whilst revealing the effects of climate change on their livelihoods and surroundings. In these communities, hunting continues to be an integral part of life, but in recent years, hunting on the thin ice has become more dangerous. They can no longer reach areas they once relied on for food sources, meaning it’s possible that this ancient way of life may disappear.
This exhibition brings together four artists who travel the world, bearing witness to what is happening to global landscapes and cultures. As curator Catherine Bédard notes: “guided by a critical awareness and sensitivity to others, they reveal some of the staggering disparities that affect humanity in various corners of the planet. These women artists embrace their position as outsiders to what they seek to portray, as witnesses who are both sensitive and unencumbered, calling upon us to combat indifference.” One artist featured in Isabelle Hayeur, who has been travelling the world since the 1990s, questioning how modern society has alienated us from the environment. For her, art “becomes a way to stand firm while staying open to wonder – to denounce what is disappearing, yet remain receptive to the beauty that endures.”
Words: Emma Jacob
Image Credits:
1. Tiina Itkonen, On top of the iceberg, 2018
2. Julian Charrière, Midnight Zone (video still), 2024, 4K video, 16:10 aspect ratio, color, 3D ambisonic soundscape, 56 min., © the artist / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2026.
3. John Akomfrah, Vertigo Sea, 2015, 3 channel high-definition video, 48:30 min., Collection of the National Gallery of Canada, Purchased 2016, 46951, © John Akomfrah, Photo: Courtesy of Smoking Dogs Films and Lisson Gallery.
4. Film still from Planet City (2021) by Liam Young. Image courtesy of the artist.
5. Tiina Itkonen, Isortoq, 2017.
6. Isabelle Hayeur, Copper Dream (de la série Ligne de faille), 2022-2023 © Isabelle Hayeur.
