Remediating the Environment with Guest Speaker Amy Balkin
email jrmize@sas.upenn.edu for info
NOT OPEN TO PUBLIC
Event part of a Spring 2023 class, “Remediating the Environment,” led by PPEH Affiliated Researcher Isabel Lane and PPEH Public Pedagogies Fellow Jane Robbins Mize
Artist Amy Balkin will visit our class to discuss her public-facing project with PPEH, "Area of Interest."
Speaker Bio: Based in San Francisco, Amy Balkin’s various long-term projects respond to society’s relationship to the land, the atmosphere, the ocean and other natural resources, and how these resources have been used and valued. Often explicitly critical of the economic and political forces that frame these resources, she thinks beyond borders and nation-states to ask global questions about their allocation and ownership. Several of her projects engage with or document individuals and communities that fight for social and environmental justice. Whether through creating a public archive of objects from places that will disappear from global warming; offering an environmental justice audio tour of impacted places along a highway; or creating a “clean air park” with emission credits the artist purchases; the thread that runs throughout is a questioning of who is entitled to nominate and enforce protections around land and the people who will benefit from it. Her work has been exhibited widely, including in the Vienna Biennale for Change (2021), The School of Landscape at the 2015 Kiev Biennial, and at dOCUMENTA(13).