INSIGHTS Lecture: Actions and reactions to living on a damaged planet with Uta Kögelsberger and Youngsook Choi, chaired by Olga Smith
In conversation with Uta Kögelsberger and Youngsook Choi
Chaired by Dr Olga Smith
Situated on Newcastle University’s campus, the Hatton Gallery has been a vital part of the North East’s cultural landscape since 1925, with a collection of over 3,000 works ranging from the 14th century to today, including pieces by Francis Bacon, Richard Hamilton, and Kurt Schwitters.
In this event marking the gallery’s centenary, artists Uta Kögelsberger and Youngsook Choi introduce their latest work and explore connections between human and ecological systems amid environmental change, with art historian Dr Olga Smith.
Biographies
Uta Kögelsberger, Newcastle University
Uta Kögelsberger (pictured top), (born Brussels, Belgium) is a German/British artist based across London and California. Her predominantly lens-based practice engages with complex relationships between human and ecological systems in a time of environmental change. It has been recognised through exhibitions in leading national and international arts institutions including LACMA, Los Angeles, the Royal Academy, London, GR, Vincent Price Museum, Los Angeles, Les Rencontres, France, the Art Night programme in collaboration with Whitechapel and Hayward Art Galleries, London amongst others. It is held in public and private collections including the MFAH and LACMA. She has been awarded the Royal Academy Wollaston Award, the Stanley Picker Fellowship, and the EAA Award for Art in Architecture. Her photographic essays have been featured in Wired, Esquire, GQ, and American Photography. She is Professor of Practice, Fine Art at Newcastle University.
Youngsook Choi, Artist and Researcher
Youngsook Choi (pictured bottom) is a cross-disciplinary artist, researcher and eco-grief advocate. Youngsook’s socially engaged site-specific practice explores intimate aesthetics of solidarity and collective healing under the umbrella theme of political spirituality. Youngsook holds a mountain as the 5th direction above East/West/South/North, postulating feeling/compassion as fundamental ways of knowing. Focusing on ecological grief, Youngsook proposes collective witnessing as a process of socio-political autopsy and building eco-literacy as an emergent pedagogy. Her long-term project ‘In Every Bite of the Emperor’ (2021-ongoing) that interweaves neo-colonial narratives across a post-mining town in Northern England, Malaysian Rainforest and the hydrosphere in Central Vietnam, is in tandem with this enquiry. Embedding organising, collective imagination, and solidarity infrastructure into her art language, Youngsook founded the transnational eco-grief council ‘Foreshadowing’ and co-founded the practice-based research collective ‘Decolonising Botany’.
Chair: Olga Smith
Olga Smith is an art historian based in the department of Fine Art at Newcastle University. Since graduating from the University of Cambridge, she has developed an international career, having worked in the UK, France, Germany and Austria. Her research has been supported by Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, Horizon 2020 and AHRC, and spans topics such as ecocriticism and landscape, interchanges between art and intellectual ideas, transnational identity, and histories of photography. She has published extensively, including, as author, Contemporary Photography in France (2022), and, as editor, Photography and Landscape (2019). Forthcoming in 2025, Methods for Ecocritical Art History, co-edited with Andrew Patrizio, is a major contribution to ecopedagogy that shows how climate emergency is appraised and countered through methods and practices of art history.
Book from 11 November
