Josephine Berry

Planetary Realism: Art Against Apocalypse
A book launch and conversation with Josephine Berry, Ros Gray and Georgia Perkins
Saturday 1 March 2025

Please join us for the launch of Josephine Berry’s ‘Planetary Realism: Art Against Apocalypse’. The new book, published by Sternberg Press, looks at how artists are finding new ways to bring the biospheric crisis and related social crises into sensation and ethical action.

In the devastating aftermath of capitalist modernity and globalization announced by climate crisis, humanity is awakening out of its fossil-fuelled somnambulance. As capitalist realism clings on with increasingly bloody insistence, artists across genres, styles and cultures have a unique capacity to open up channels to an underlying planetary real.

The book contains chapters on environmental feeling and sensation as transformative capacities, the rupture of petro-modernity, eco-aesthetic communes, diasporic aesthetics and migration politics.

Biographies

Josephine Berry writes on aesthetic politics with a particular focus on the intersections between art, site and (bio)power. Her first monograph, Art and (Bare) Life: A Biopolitical Inquiry (2019, Sternberg Press), examined the importance of autonomous art for modern biopower. She teaches at the Royal College of Art, and Goldsmiths University.

Ros Gray is Programme Director of the MA Art & Ecology at Goldsmiths University. Her research and teaching often involves collaborations with artists, scientists and activists, addressing ecological emergency with an emphasis on climate justice.

Georgia Perkins is a researcher and curator based in London. Her research investigates the relationship between molecular and sensible politics in art theory, environmental feminism and queer studies. She is a teaching fellow in Media Practices at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, curatorial fellow at SIRIUS, Ireland, and a doctoral candidate in the Visual Cultures Department at Goldsmiths University.