SESSION: 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 (and 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.
Session Convenors:
Elspeth Mitchell, University of Leeds
Gill Park, University of Leeds
Speakers:
Caterina Franciosi, Yale University
“Black’d” Bodies: Coal, Women’s Labour, and the Matter of Visibility
In the parlours of mid-nineteenth-century Britain, women blackened their own bodies so that middle-class households could experience coal heat as a pristine, immaterial force. Maids-of-all-work rose before dawn to lay fuel and polish grates, tended fires throughout the day, and scraped soot and ash. The unseen mediation of the dirt and disorder generated by industrial capital’s thermodynamic flows eroded personhood, exposing working women to relentless heat and toxic grime. This paper examines the photographs and diaries of one such woman: Hannah Cullwick (1833–1909), a maid-of-all-work employed in London and Margate between the 1850s and 1870s. Cullwick documented her daily labour amid coal’s residue and posed “in her dirt” for photographs orchestrated with Arthur Munby (1828-1910), a social journalist who obsessively scrutinized working-class women. While her writings and photographs have been read as passive reflections of Munby’s fetishistic fantasies of degradation and mastery, I argue that they reveal the entanglements of patriarchal
power, race, and class shaping women’s labour under fossil capital. In one striking image, Cullwick sits half-naked on the floor with a steel chain around her neck, her skin darkened with black lead. Posing as a chimney sweep, she invokes the racialized iconography of enslavement and industrial servitude that informed representations of underground women miners in the 1840s. Even within the dynamics of subjugation and surveillance that determined Cullwick’s presence before the camera, I argue that her performances urge viewers to recognize a subversive potential. By reclaiming coal, the medium of her oppression, as a medium of radical visibility, Cullwick enacts a refusal of fossil capital’s ongoing logic of dematerialization.
Tobah Aukland-Peck, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
Creative Dereliction: Extractive Waste and the Niddrie Woman
In 1975, British conceptual artist John Latham encountered a series of slag heaps outside of Edinburgh, monumental waste piles that remained from a century of mining. Latham petitioned the Scottish government to designate the heaps as an artwork: the Niddrie Woman. He asserted that this was a readymade sculpture in the form of a dismembered female body. As cycles of deindustrialisation threatened Britain’s manufacturing capacity in the 1960s and 1970s, the language of infertility and death established a relationship between subterranean mining and the female body. Although miners made the heaps, Latham positioned himself as the artwork’s creator, conjuring a human presence not through industrial labour but in a female body beset by environmental and sexual violence. Resisting Latham’s characterization, I identify these waste formations as material traces of human intervention in the environment. The slag heaps present visual evidence of mining labor while the archive of paper waste around Latham’s project contains the work of his frequently unacknowledged female collaborators, Barbara Steveni and Rita Donagh. This paper shows that in the hands of workers and women artists, those often deprived of agency, these waste materials offered the opportunity for rethinking structures of productivity outside the bounds of extractive profit. I address issues of labour, materiality, and waste to shift the female body from a subject of environmental violence to an agent—in both participating in systems of extractive capitalism and in imagining ways to delineate its consequences—disrupting the dichotomy of male artist and female earth.
Jessica Saxby
Decolonial Ecologies and the Art of Planting
Presented a well-reasoned critique of the partisanship she believed persisted within the institution, thereby shedding light on the mechanisms behind the functioning of Brazil’s most important art salon at the time, while also revealing the standpoint of a woman artist within that context.Since the early 2010s there has been a renewed interest in plants and their politics in art. This paper argues that a powerful politicization of the depiction of plants in art can emerge by drawing on the analytical framework of decolonial ecology. If colonialism produced the genocide and enslavement of Indigenous and Black peoples and the destruction of ecosystems and biodiversity the world over, then contrary to some forms of response to climate crisis in the West, thinkers of decolonial ecologies argue these histories must be thought together as a critique of both humans and non-humans — including plants, soil, minerals — transformed into “resources” (Ferdinand, 2019). Deploying this framework for analysis, it will focus on two works: Jumana Manna’s film Foragers (2021) and Shanece Oretha’s exhibition ‘Ah So It Go, Ah No So It Go, Go So!’ at Cubitt Gallery (2022). It will explore the way the extractive pairing of human/non-human life as a resource is expressed through the experience of the dispossession of land in both works. It will analyse the aesthetic strategies that evoke a different kind of continuity between plants and humans, one of the mutual sustaining of life. In this way, this paper will contribute to a nascent discussion around the role of the vegetal in contemporary art, expanding upon existing art historical analysis, which, for the most part, has thus far concentrated on how art can produce new conceptions of plants in an era of anthropocentrism (Aloi, 2019).
Kate Keohane, University of Oxford
Beeing in the World: Balling, Buzzing and Burn Out
This paper takes the phenomenon of “balling” in bees (the collective act of surrounding and overheating to cause death) as a provocation for thinking through art history’s response to the heat of the present. In a world of accelerating ecological and affective temperatures, the bees’ strategy offers a potent heat-centric mode of collective resistance, embodied labour, and interspecies care. Drawing on my wider project Beeing-in-the-world, which traces the relations of art, ecology, and communication through practices by artists such as Jesse Darling, Anicka Yi, Nikita Gale, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, and Oreet Ashery, this paper will examine how contemporary art mediates conditions of social and environmental collapse alongside alternative forms of storytelling. Blending art historical and theoretical research (McKittrick 2021; Barad 2015; Federici 2019) with poetic reflection and relational case studies, within this paper, bees’ collective heat-work becomes a way of thinking through the creative and curatorial strategies that arise under conditions of burnout, extraction, and systemic heat, where survival depends on the maintenance of fragile infrastructures. Through close readings of artworks that engage multispecies entanglement and ecological repair, I argue for an art history attuned to temperature not as metaphor, but as a mode of sensing and survival. “Balling” thereby becomes both metaphor and method: an intersectional and materialist practice of staying-with, where desire, burnout, and defence coalesce.