Planetary Realism: Art Against Apocalypse

By Josephine Berry

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1915609232
• ISBN13: 9781915609236
• Release Date: June 2025
• Publisher: Sternberg Press
• Length: 232 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.1" x 9.4"