Art History Warmed Up?
How can art history respond to the heat of the present? Hito Steyerl’s Medium Hot (2025) proposes temperature as a conceptual framework for understanding art’s entanglement in planetary-scale crises, infrastructures and networks. Rather than stable categories or binaries (hot/cold, digital/analogue, subject/object), medium hot’ describes a shifting and compromised condition of mediation under climate collapse.
We invite papers that respond to or critically expand Steyerl’s provocation, bringing feminist, decolonial and materialist perspectives to bear on questions of climate, image making and planetary survival. We ask: how does art—its histories, institutions, and practices—register or resist the intensifying effects of climate catastrophe? How are feminist and ecological critiques reconfiguring our understanding of work, reproduction, care and infrastructure in the context of environmental collapse? What are the artistic and curatorial strategies that emerge under conditions of burnout, extraction and systemic heat?
This panel aims to foster dialogue around the role of art and the writing of its histories in a world becoming increasingly unliveable, focusing on what art can do—not just to represent crisis, but to propose new modes of inhabiting and resisting it.
We welcome contributions on themes including (but not limited to):
- Feminist and ecological methodologies
- Artistic and curatorial responses to climate change and planetary crisis
- Labour, exhaustion and reproductive work
- Aesthetics of maintenance, decay and infrastructural critique
- Mediations of heat, temperature and environmental affect
- Decolonising and Indigenous approaches to land, art and survival
- Art and climate technologies
- Non-human and more-than human perspectives on art and critique
Submit your Paper via this form. Please download, complete and send it directly to the Session Convenor(s) below by Sunday 2 November 2025:
Elspeth Mitchell, University of Leeds, e.r.mitchell@leeds.ac.uk
Gill Park, University of Leeds, g.park@leeds.ac.uk