About this Event
Sria Chatterjee proposes specific strategies through what she calls “critical climate seeing”. In critical climate seeing, picturing and seeing assume a symbiotic relationship, both cognisant of the partiality of visualising a climate crisis while at once committed to filling in the gaps. By turning to the work of Guyanese artist Donald Locke and Bangladeshi artist Sarker Protick – two artists working in different media, from different time periods and from different (post)colonial contexts – the overarching question Sria asks is: When the long, leaky, tentacular histories of overlapping systems of extractivism and oppression are difficult to picture, can “critical climate seeing” offer concrete opportunities to disaggregate the gaze, to see with and through form, and into infrastructural and epistemic formations that undergird the climate crisis?
Sria Chatterjee is an environmental humanities scholar and art historian. She is the Head of Research Initiatives at the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art in London (PMC). Sria specialises in the political ecologies of art and design from the colonial to the contemporary and leads the multi-year research project, Climate & Colonialism at the PMC. Her work is led by the conviction that art historical research and methods can productively be brought to bear on some of the pressing social questions of our time. In 2020, she founded and led the award-winning digital project, Visualizing the Virus, which showed the many inequalities pandemics make visible. She received her PhD from Princeton University and publishes widely in both academic and public-facing outlets. Previously, her work has been supported by the Terra Foundation, the Max-Planck Institute, the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University, among others. She has served as a judge for the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize for historical non-fiction, serves on the Advisory Board for Cooking Sections’ CLIMAVORE project and is a Trustee of Pitzhanger Manor & Gallery. In October 2026, Sria was invited to deliver the prestigious Horst Gerson Lecture in the Netherlands. This lecture will be a version of what she presented there.
Image caption: Sarker Protick , Awngar , 2024– ongoing. Courtesy Sarker Protick
Accessibility at a Glance at the Paul Mellon Centre
✖ Level access
✔ Livestreamed
✔ Recorded
✔ Hearing loop available (please contact [email protected])
✔ Closed caption on Zoom
✖ BSL
If you wish to inform us of any access requirements, please email events@paul-mellon-centre.
Event venue & nearby stays
The Paul Mellon Centre, 16 Bedford Square, London, United Kingdom
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