Author: Subhankar Banerjee on “a Library, a Classroom, and the World”

Indian-born American photographer, writer and conservationist Subhankar Banerjee will speak about art, social transformation and “a Library, a Classroom, and the World,” a project in the 2022 Venice Biennale art exhibition Personal Structures organized by the European Cultural Centre in Venice, Italy. Spread across two venues, the historic Palazzo Bembo along the Grand Canal and the Giardini della Marinaressa along the waterfront of the Venice Lagoon, the installation addresses the two most consequential challenges of human history: the biodiversity and climate crises. Banerjee served as the director and cocurator (with Jennifer Garcia Peacock) of an expansive team of artists and scholars who collectively span three generations, represent multiple ethnicities and hail from several continents.

a Library, a Classroom, and the World aims to build bridges across places, peoples and time. It also rebels against our frenzied time and urges us to slow down to take a closer look.

Banerjee is Professor of Art & Ecology and founding Director of both the Center for Environmental Arts and Humanities and the Species in Peril project at the University of New Mexico. His place-based and community-engaged interdisciplinary and intersectional efforts aim to advance multispecies justice to mitigate the intensifying biodiversity and climate crises. Coeditor of The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change (2021), Banerjee was most recently co-host (with U.S. Senator Tom Udall) of the UNM Biodiversity Webinar Series (2020), cocurator of Species in Peril Along the Rio Grande (2019), and convener of the last oil: a multispecies justice symposium (2018). His photographs have been exhibited in more than fifty museum exhibitions around the world.