Amanda Boetzkes
Amanda Boetzkes is Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Guelph. Her research specializes in ecology, theories of consciousness and perception. Over the course of her career, she has analyzed complex human relationships with the environment through the lens of aesthetics, patterns of human waste, and the global energy economy. She is the author of Plastic Capitalism: Contemporary Art and the Drive to Waste (MIT Press, 2019), The Ethics of Earth Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) and a forthcoming book titled Ecologicity, Vision and the Planetarity of Art. She is co-editor of Art's Realism in the Post-Truth Era (Edinburgh University Press, 2024), Artworks for Jellyfish and Other Others (Noxious Sector Press, 2022) and Heidegger and the Work of Art History (Ashgate, 2014). In her most recent research, Boetzkes focuses on environmental knowledge and aesthetics in the circumpolar North, the politics of Inuit sovereignty, and the Greenland Ice Sheet as a site of scientific, social, and perceptual importance. In 2019, she held an interdisciplinary, site-specific workshop in Ilulissat, Greenland, and curated a performance by the Greenlandic artist Jessie Kleemann on the Ice Sheet. This performance has since shown at numerous exhibitions and galleries including Inua at the inaugural exhibition of the Inuit Art Center in Winnipeg (2021); Exposure: Native Art and Political Ecology at the Museum of Contemporary Native Art in Santa Fe (2021); Worst Case Scenario: Four Artists from Greenland - Pia Arke, Julie Edel Hardenberg, Elisabeth Heilmann Blind, Jessie Kleemann at the Lunds Konsthalle in Sweden (2021); Jessie Kleemann at the Portland Museum of Art (2022); Jessie Kleemann: Running Time* at the Danish National Gallery (2023); and the Nordic pavilion of COP28 in Dubai (2023).