Monica Sjöö
Adam Kleinman, Artforum
September 2023
The intensity and increased frequency of individual wildfires, which now span the globe from Australia to Canada, can be spied as a single global omen of a forthcoming man-made climate catastrophe. Consequently, artists, writers, and curators are faced with a critical question: How can we effectively engage people to confront ecological destruction in a crowded cultural field that is intricately interconnected yet marred by disparities in wealth, resources, geography, desire, and power?
Contemporary art and curatorial discourse have focused on three main strategies for building a sense of progressive solidarity: promoting the notion of care, encouraging empathy, and shaming complicity. “The Great Cosmic Mother,” the first major retrospective of Monica Sjöö (1938–2005), a Swedish British radical eco-witch, artist, organizer, and pamphleteer, traces the long preherstory of these approaches through her life’s work, yet braids them together through a fourth dimension, generally neglected today: spiritual unity […]