On the occasion of Oliver Ressler’s solo exhibition Barricading the Ice Sheets at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), Marco Baravalle, iLiana Fokianaki, Oliver Ressler and Ameli M. Klein discuss artistic forms of resistance in the face of the climate crisis. Taking Ressler’s methods as an example, the discussion unravels how artists’ involvement in social movements has developed over the past decades, the modus operandi of activism within the realm of art, and how artists become protagonists of protest movements.

Marco Baravalle (*1979 in Venice) is a member of S.a.L.E. Docks, a collective and project space for art, activism, and experimental theater founded in 2007 at a former salt warehouse in Venice. He is a member of the Institute of Radical Imagination (IRI), which aims to define and implement postcapitalist ways of life. From 2018 to 2022, Baravalle was a research associate for the project “INCOMMON. In praise of community: shared creativity in arts and politics in Italy (1959–1979),” sponsored by Università Iuav di Venezia. Baravalle is the author of L’autunno caldo del curatore: arte, neoliberismo, pandemia [The curator’s hot autumn: art, neoliberalism, pandemic] (Venice: Marsilio, 2021). In 2021, he was a fellow of the Fulbright Visiting Student Researcher Program at CUNY Graduate Center New York.

Ameli M. Klein (1993* in Eckernförde) studied Art History, American Studies, and Theater Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz (2017), and Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH / USA (2016–2017). In 2018–2019, she was a visiting scholar at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY / USA. Klein’s fellowships include the Engagement Program for International Curators at the Association of Art Museum Curators & AAMC Foundation, New York (2022) and she is the recipient of the 2020 Shanghai Curators Lab TANK CURATOR Prize. She has held guest lectures at the German Study Center in Venice (2021) and the Dutch Art Institute, Arnhem (2021), among others. She co-founded the collaborative project Collective Rewilding.

iLiana Fokianaki (*1980 in Thessaloniki) works as a curator, writer, and theorist in Rotterdam and Athens. She studied Fine Arts at Oxford Brookes University and Arts Criticism and Management at City University in London. In 2013, she founded State of Concept Athens, a nonprofit exhibition space. There she curated solo exhibitions by Kader Attia (2021), Sanja Iveković (2019), Laure Prouvost (2016), and Jonas Staal (2016), among others. Her project, The Bureau of Care (2020–2022), received the European Cultural Foundation Solidarity Grant. Fokianaki has developed lecture series for various institutions, including Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, and regularly publishes in journals such as e-flux and frieze. She is currently researching her PhD on identity and politics at the Panteion University of Athens, together with Athena Athanasiou.