Christina Battle’s (Edmonton, Canada) research and artistic work consider the parameters of disaster; looking to it as action, as more than mere event and instead as a framework operating within larger systems of power. Through this research she imagines how disaster could be utilized as a tactic for social change and as a tool for reimagining how dominant systems might radically shift. She has exhibited internationally in festivals and galleries, most recently at: Latitude 53 (Edmonton), Harbourfront Centre (Toronto), Capture Photography Festival (Vancouver); Forum Expanded at the Berlinale (Berlin), Blackwood Gallery (Mississagua), Trinity Square Video (Toronto), and Nuit Blanche Toronto.

Image: Christina Battle, postcards for a better budget: reimagining the cut – participatory project at Latitude 53 (Edmonton), curated by Noor Bhangu, 2019 & 2020.

Image description: A collage with cut-out, black and white images of a bird with its beak open perched on a branch next to mushrooms. The background is filled with stripes and patches of bright colours. In the upper right corner, there are five cut-out individual words in black text on a white background that read “Albertans deserve better need better”.

What does it mean for artists and communities to take up the slack when our government actively fights against prioritizing our environment in the wake of the climate crisis?

Battle’s research searches for strategies to working with remediation and reclamation as preventative measure, and considers how remediation might instead become understood as a tactic for avoiding extraction in the first place. Her approach takes at its premise the notion that the act of shifting perspectives around remediation: from something that occurs in hindsight (after the fact), into something that prevents and avoids, is a working solution for tackling both environmental and social change.

www.cbattle.com