Planetary Realism

Art Against Apocalypse

Josephine Berry

$55

Paperback

Forthcoming
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English

Sternberg Press
22 July 2025

Theory of art; Art & design styles: c 1900 to c 1960; Picture books

Traditions of realism are brought together with the decolonial and ecological concept of ""planetarity"" to understand a new realism in contemporary art.

Traditions of realism are brought together with the decolonial and ecological concept of ""planetarity"" to understand a new realism in contemporary art.

The devastation left in the wake of modernity and globalization is revealing a fragile and unfamiliar planet, and humanity has awakened to a new real. If the old ""realist"" tools of objectivism have contributed to capitalist society's divorce from the natural world, how are artists finding new ways to make us really see-and feel-the planet?

Surveying a body of planet-facing art, communal practices, and activism, Josephine Berry investigates art's power to break with capitalist realism and decarbonize the imagination. With chapters on feeling as world-making, the rupture of petroleum landscapes, artists' urban exodus, and migration as survival, Planetary Realism delves deeply into art's necessary reimagining of life on Earth.

By: Josephine Berry
Imprint: Sternberg Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 241mm, Width: 156mm, Spine: 17mm
Weight: 425g
ISBN: 9781915609236
ISBN 10: 1915609232
Pages: 232
Publication Date: 22 July 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Josephine Berry is an art theorist, writer and political thinker. She has written on art in the neoliberal context of creative cities (No Room to Move- Radical Art in the Regenerate City, 2010), and more recently on the function of autonomous art within contemporary biopower (Art and (Bare) Life- A Biopolitical Inquiry, Sternberg 2018). She is Tutor at the Royal College of Art, London and lectures at Goldsmiths College. She edited London-based cultural politics magazine Mute for over a decade.