50. How Does Art Register Ecological Change? Rethinking Stability in the History of Representation

Contemporary discussions of ecology in art frequently focus on environmental crisis, climate change or activism. This session begins from a different premise. Ecological change does not simply alter our understanding of the natural world. It also unsettles the aesthetic structures through which Western culture has imagined stable relations between humans and animals, culture and nature, subject and object and self and world.

Across the history of art, representation has often contributed to making these relations appear coherent and enduring. Hierarchies between men and women, human and non-human life, reason and matter and civilisation and nature have frequently been given aesthetic form, not simply reflected but rendered sensible, persuasive and durable. As these inherited distinctions become increasingly unstable, what new forms of representation emerge? How does art register ecological change before it becomes environmental imagery or political programme?

This session invites up to 4 papers that examine how artworks disclose changing ecological relations across historical and contemporary contexts. Contributions might consider canonical and contemporary art, architecture, film, performance and artistic research. Topics may include feminist and posthuman thought, multispecies relations, reproductive labour, material agency, colonial and postcolonial ecologies, religious imaginaries, technologies of representation or artistic practices that challenge inherited distinctions between human and non-human life.

Rather than treating ecology as a discrete subject, the session understands it as a transformation in the relations through which life is organised, represented and experienced. It asks how art not only reflects such transformations but participates in reimagining the conditions of coexistence.

Themes: Ecology, Art history, Representation

Additional format comment: 4 twenty-minute papers with a round table at the end.

Lead Convenor: W.K. Lyhne, UAL, United Kingdom

To submit a Paper to this Session, please follow the guidance on our website and complete the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form.