Excerpt:
From Iceland to Bangladesh, a new kind of weather station is mapping out the stark effects of climate change

Climate change is the most pressing issue of our time, but it’s a subject on which artists and writers have been slow starters. ‘The natural world has always been their territory,’ explains Michael Morris, co-director of London-based art organization Artangel, on an unseasonably warm winter day in London. ‘Yet they haven’t been part of the climate conversation in the way they might be. We wanted to combine the knowledge of scientists and the imagination of artists. That’s what was missing.’

It was during the pandemic lockdowns that Morris and fellow co-director James Lingwood first came up with the idea of creating artists’ weather stations – location-specific artworks and activities delving into climate data. Yet, they quickly ran into one of the subject’s great challenges: the sheer scale of climate change, and its diffuse causes and symptoms. Their initial plan had been to form stations around the United Kingdom, but soon realized that this scheme fell short. ‘Weather is local; climate is global,’ explains Lingwood. ‘The one thing it isn’t is national.’

Their solution was to pass the conceptual and curatorial torch to an expansive web of artists and institutions in 27 countries, which together form the World Weather Network: a series of regional, climate-focused artworks, exhibitions, talks, and seminars unfolding in 2023. At the Network’s core is an online hub on which projects can be experienced without the environmental cost of shipping or travel. Truly vast in its reach, the project includes well-known names like Liam Gillick, Katie Paterson, and Hiroshi Sugimoto, as well as under-the-radar artist collectives, poets, musicians, dancers, writers, and scientists, with many contributors working far from art’s usual commercial or institutional centers…