IFP welcomes Finnish artist Hanna Husberg to Beijing for a 3-month residency supported by IASPIS.
Urban Air
Urban climatology - the study of the interaction between urban areas and the atmosphere - originates some 200 years ago. Since then an ever growing part of the world’s human population have become city dwellers, and ‘urban air’ has become increasingly palpable through phenomena such as urban heat islands. Cities are weather changers due to modification of land surfaces, and due to geometric effects. In any given location the physical form of a city directly affects the microclimate of its outdoor spaces, and alters regional metabolisms. Further energy intensive, and often pollutant, activities concentrate in and around cities. The altered atmosphere that results from these has huge effects on the lives of a vast number of people living in highly urbanised areas, as can already be experienced through phenomena such as smog and dust clouds. In a predominantly urban world no one is out of the sphere of urban industrial capitalism nor that of ‘urban air’. There are however distributions of airspaces and political-economic geographies of air.
The residency in Beijing permits me to get a first-hand experience of the rapidly expanding urbanisation, and the implications this has for the inhabitants of metropolitan Beijing. As I have not specifically addressed the urban space in my prior artistic work this experience is very valuable for me as it will allow me to access a, for me, yet unexplored aspect of how one can understand air.
Hanna Husberg (b.1981, Finland) is a Stockholm based artist. She graduated from ENSB-A, Paris in 2007, and is currently a Phd in Practice candidate at the academy of fine arts Vienna. Through a practice of audiovisual and installation projects she investigates how we perceive, and relate to our environment in times of anthropogenic climate change. Together with Laura McLean she conceived the Contingent Movements Archive and Symposium(Maldives Pavilion, 55th Venice Biennale / Adapting in the Anthropocene, UNESCO, Paris) Other recent projects include Human Meteorology (Galleri Mejan, Stockholm / Chateau de Chamarande) and Being with (CEEAC, Strasbourg). Hanna is also a participant of Frontiers in Retreat, a research platform in Multidisciplinary Approaches to Ecology in Contemporary Art coordinated by HIAP, Helsinki, and HYBRID MATTERs, an art & science network program which investigates the convergence of the physical and digital world into a hybrid ecology.