VOICES FOR THE FUTURE, an immersive art installation by New Zealand-based artist Joseph Michael, produced in collaboration with environmental charity Project Pressure, lights up the United Nations General Assembly and Secretariat buildings in New York ahead of the UN’s Climate Action Summit and global school strikes, with an artwork unveiled to the public on Friday, September 20.

This installation will spotlight large-scale projections covering the outside of the UN with images of a massive iceberg, setting the scene for the voices of six young advocates, including Swedish student activist Greta Thunberg, commenting on the nature of the climate crisis and urgent actions that can, and must, be taken to minimize the consequences of climate change.

VOICES FOR THE FUTURE opens with an iteration of Joseph Michael’s artwork, Antarctica: while you were sleeping, showcasing powerful visuals of an iceberg slowly crashing down the sides of the 500-foot tall United Nations building, intended to bring the remoteness of the Antarctic to the core of urban New York.Composer Rhian Sheehan has created a musical soundscape, which together with Michael’s work reflects how icebergs crack, shift and breathe, revealing their fragility.

Part two of the installation, authored by Project Pressure founder Klaus Thymann, and visualized by Joseph Michael, features the voices of the six young advocates addressing their hopes and fears for the future, in relation to the climate crisis. Each of the six voices will speak one of the six official UN languages – Russian, Arabic, French, Spanish, English and Mandarin – and represent one of the world’s populated continents.  The words of the voices will scroll the length of the building. To support the messaging, the second act is accompanied by music by Brian Eno.

With the sides of the United Nations building serving as a canvas for the audio-visual installation, the audience will experience up close the beauty, size and sound of a colossal iceberg.  Together with the messages from the younger generation, VOICES FOR THE FUTURE transforms the UN into a glowing beacon, highlighting the climate crisis, underlining the need to preserve our world for future generations and the critical decisions to be made at the summit.

Heli image by Simon Godsiff.

The Imperfect Atlas, 2014. © Peter Funch

Alt. +1000 photo festival in Switzerland is renowned for exhibitions of contemporary photography with mountain themes. Whether by climbing mountains, building roads and parking lots, planting a cross, or working the steep land, humans have left their mark on the landscape for centuries and this footprint is at the centre of the fifth edition of the Alt. +1000 festival.

WARNING SIGNS by Project Pressure will be exhibited in and around Lake Taillères, the centre of the “Siberia of Switzerland”. The exhibition consists of nearly 80 images – a combination of stunning artworks and an informative poster campaign visualizing the climate crisis in an inspiring way. The event offers art and nature lovers, as well as fa­milies, a photographic stroll through a remarkable landscape.

In addition to Lake Taillères, the festival takes place at two other magnificent sites – the Grand-Cachot-de-Vent farm and the Musée des beaux-arts Le Locle (MBAL) where visitors can enjoy 80 years of mountain images by Magnum photographers, as well as a solo exhibition by Project Pressure collaborator Noémie Goudal among other works.

1-22.09.2019
Mon – Sun, 10.00 am – 5.00 pm
Free admission

www.plus1000.ch

Sponsored by the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment.

Ice Cave, Vatnajökull, 2014. © Richard Mosse

MELTDOWN featured in The Guardian with a selection of artworks from the entire exhibition at The Natural History Museum in Vienna. The show is open until the 1st of September.

Glaciér 1-3, 2016. © Noémie Goudal

Our exhibition MELTDOWN visualizing climate change at the Natural History Museum, Vienna, is now officially open. We couldn’t think of a better place to launch Project Pressure’s travelling exhibition with artworks by Corey Arnold, Michael Benson, Broomberg & Chanarin, Edward Burtynsky, Scott Conarroe, Peter Funch, Noémie Goudal, Adam Hinton, Richard Mosse, Simon Norfolk, Norfolk + Thymann, Christopher Parsons, Toby Smith and Klaus Thymann.

Opening hours and information about how to get there here.

MELTDOWN – a visualization of climate change by Project Pressure

Natural History Museum, Vienna
June 4th –  September 8th, 2019

Since 2008 Project Pressure has been commissioning world-renowned artists to conduct expeditions around the world, and for the first time these works will be shown together as MELTDOWN, a travelling exhibition premiering at the Natural History Museum, Vienna.
Project Pressure uses art as a positive touch point to inspire engagement and behavioural change. The selected artworks in MELTDOWN relate to vanishing glaciers, to demonstrate the impact of climate change through various media. Unlike wildfires, flooding and other weather events, glacier mass loss can be 100% attributed to global temperature changes and as such, they are key indicators of climate change.
The exhibition is a narrative of the importance of glaciers told in a scientific, illustrative and poetic way and each artist has a unique take on the subject. MELTDOWN shows scale from the planetary level to microscopic biological impact, and considers humanitarian suffering and more. Together the artistic interpretations in MELTDOWN give visitors unique insights into the world’s cryosphere, its fragile ecosystem and our changing global climate.
Featured artists are: Corey Arnold (US), Michael Benson (US), Adam Broomberg (ZA) & Oliver Chanarin (UK), Edward Burtynsky (CA), Scott Conarroe (CA), Peter Funch (DK), Noémie Goudal (FR), Adam Hinton (UK), Richard Mosse (IE), Simon Norfolk (NG), Christopher Parsons (UK), Toby Smith (UK) and Klaus Thymann (DK).
The second stop for our travelling show will be Horniman Museum and Gardens, London, opening the 23rd of November. More information to follow.

World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS) is currently in the process of adding to the Glacier Photo Collection, hosted by National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in USA. This is to ensure that the information and imagery of glaciers, that form the WGMS Fluctuations of Glaciers (FoG) database, are better represented. Currently there are several locations where WGMS’s photos are of poor quality or the glaciers of particular significance have limited documentation, these include Russia, Norway, Canada, Svalbard, Switzerland, Greenland, New Zealand, the USA, and Austria, amongst others. Thus we are inviting any individual with relevant glacial photographs to please share them with us, here you will find a list of all the glaciers WGMS are interested in gathering photographs of and use these instructions to upload your imagery.

The glaciers in Ecuador are receding due to climate change. We look at mountains and panoramas and we assume our surroundings are immutable and resilient, when we are in fact experiencing a rapid change in Earth’s landscapes.
Project Pressure is collaborating with Emma Stibbon to see how she as an artist creates work inspired by the changing environment. With the glaciated sites in Ecuador Stibbon felt she wanted to say something about the extraordinary scenery but also point to the poignancy of the fact that the changes in the landscape will be witnessed within her own lifetime.
The team travelled to Ecuador visiting multiple glaciers at high altitudes up to 5100 m where Stibbon created sketches and collected soil that was used to make pigment for the drawings she created in her studio upon returning.
The “A Blank Canvas” project was made possible through a collaboration with Adidas TERREX.

Project Pressure developed a new way of visualising the changes in glacier landscapes through photography in collaboration with Dutch film company PostPanic and geologist Erik Schytt Holmlund.
By sourcing images from 1946, 1959, 1980, 2008 and 2017 of the Tarfala Valley and the Kebnekaise mountain in Sweden, the team created 3D models of these landscapes through photogrammetry. Throughout the video, viewers can see the landscape fade in and out with each year. As the video progresses into more recent times, the devastating impact humans continue to have on the melting glacier landscape is undeniable.
In 2018 the highest point in Sweden changed, excessive heat in 2018 melted the South peak of the Kebnekaise mountain so the North peak is now Sweden’s highest point.

Image: Thjorsa River, Iceland, 2012, © Edward Burtynsky/Project Pressure

“Ed Burtynsky explores the water storage and transport systems that can be found in glaciers, focusing on how they release water into the world’s river systems. The resulting images depict the beauty and monumental scale of the meltwater runoff. Burtynsky reminds us of what we are losing as glaciers continue to diminish across the globe.”
See the full gallery here.
When Records Melt exhibition with contributing artists Michael Benson (US), Adam Broomberg (ZA) & Oliver Chanarin (UK), Edward Burtynsky (CA), Peter Funch (DK), Noémie Goudal (FR), Simon Norfolk (NG), Christopher Parsons (UK) and Klaus Thymann (DK).