Cultural Justice and the Return of the Material in Contemporary Art


Cultural justice
Materiality
Restitution
fromApr 22, 2026toApr 22, 2025

From restitution debates to object-oriented and participatory practices, this lesson examines how artists wield matter and collective strategies to reckon with memory, power, and cultural responsibility, making the material a site of justice and transformation.

Cultural Justice and the Return of the Material in Contemporary Art

This lesson offers critical insights by examining contemporary artistic practices that foreground the intertwinement of the climate crisis and cultural loss, demonstrating how the emergence of new visions of cultural justice is inevitably tied to—and intersects with—environmental and climate advocacy. Environmentally-engaged artistic projects, such as those by Martha Atienza, Nabil Ahmed, Amar Kanwar, and Ursula Biemann, insist upon the critical value of multivocality in imagining more-than-just ways of living in the world, thinking through and working with a plural range of knowledge-makers to establish collective infrastructures of legal restitution and epistemic repair. The examination of photographic and filmic works by Armin Linke and Lisa Rave, among others—drawn by geo-cultural affinities to the Pacific archipelago—further considers how narrative visualisations can become instrumental in transforming ecological grief into a catalyst for climate action, while making visible the entangled relations between human societies and the environment. The lesson also reflects on the recently published special issue Thinking The World from The Deep Ocean: Seabed Mining Across Resource, Regulatory, and Ethical Frontiers, co-edited by Nabil Ahmed, Ute Meta Bauer, Jonathan Galka, and Hervé Raimana Lallemant-Moe, for the Comparative Law Journal of the Pacific, under the auspices of the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. The publication convenes a diversity of research-driven artists, lawyers, scholars and scientists to think from the ocean as a capacious site for generative inquiry—one that is inhabited by diverse cultures of human and more-than-human life—and to dissolve obsolete boundaries derived from inherited colonial-extractive logics. Finally, the lesson examines practices primarily focused on materiality, process, and circular economies through the work of Yee I-Lann and Ari Bayuaji. 

Book your lesson

Privacy PolicyCookie Policy

Institution S.R.L. - Piazza Garibaldi, 12 - 47018 - Santa Sofia - Italy

holding img 1
holding img 2
logo