Retreat

 Screening Room IV

In Retreat, we turn to the Earth’s ice-covered places, with a particular focus on the polar regions. Two works set the scene: co-curator David Cass’s Till (made in collaboration with digital artist Sam Healy) and Adam Sébire’s Sikkorluppoq, each concerned with ice-cover in the Arctic. The poles are often described as ground zero for climate change, and summer Arctic sea-ice extent is a clear indicator of that process: Cass & Healy’s data-driven summary shows the region’s summer ice declining from roughly 8–9 million km² in 1895 to 4.28 million km² in 2024 – effectively a loss of about half the summer cover. Sébire’s film translates that loss into lived terms, showing how summer retreat shapes the daily realities of communities in northern Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) year-round.

In broader terms, as ice retreats – both at sea and on land – Earth loses vital reflective surfaces that send sunlight back into space; more solar energy is therefore absorbed by the ocean, which has taken up the majority of recent excess heat and now sits at record-high heat content, reducing its ability to buffer further warming, triggering cascading impacts.

Till
David Cass

Video Art

Formed from thousands of found scanned papers, Till as an alternative form of graph; an artistic rendering of environmental data reminiscent of an aerial coastline, where light coloured sheets represent ice and the dark carbon-papers represent sea. Dark, heat storing sea. The piece imagines Arctic ice as a living entity, its fate inseparable from our own. The diminishing extent of summer ice is clear to see, drawn from early captains’ logs and whaling records to contemporary satellite readings. As years progress and ice cover diminishes, so too do the light papers. Watch the centre of the screen, where subtle date markers track the passing years.

Alongside the science and structure of the work sits another kind of archive: personal, analogue, human. In Scots, the word till carries meanings of both accumulation and residue. The scanned papers, then, are the till of life – letters, postcards, tickets, certificates – gathered and repurposed. These are more than ephemera – they are an accidental archive, compiled as we extracted minerals, burned oil, and warmed the Earth. They speak not only to what we did, but to what we stand to lose, and in many cases, how we’ll lose it. Travel brochures, oil adverts, blueprints, endless receipts, and hundred-year-old photographs taken aboard ships whose purpose was to destroy icebergs with explosives: these artefacts document the systems and choices that have led us to this point. In retrospect, they read like warnings, subtle evidence of a world nearing transformation.

The film’s cover image (above) is a still form the year 2012: a record low when sea ice shrank to just 3.41 million km².

Sikkorluppoq
Adam Sébire

Short

An indigenous community in northern Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) spends half the year atop the frozen ocean. What happens when their sea ice is weakened by global heating? Produced in 2024 as part of a collaboration between Uummannaq Children’s Home in northwest Greenland and artist-filmmaker Adam Sébire from Arctic Norway, this is an extended teaser for a 15-minute film.

With the help of indigenous staff, the team collated a series of words in the local Kalaallisut dialect that described the difficulties posed by the changing sea-ice conditions around Uummannaq. This was not straightforward: as a polysynthetic language that has faced the colonial marginalisation common to many indigenous tongues, there were few official sources or agreed spellings in the local dialect. The children each chose a word, discussed its meaning, and, with Adam, decided how to film it.

The tool known as a tooq is used by Inuit hunters to test ice thickness and to make holes for fishing. Armed with tooqs, Adam filmed each child explaining their word and writing it into the ice; then, as an ensemble, they constructed the new word.

Interviews with Inuit elders and hunters also appear; many are projected onto icebergs for re-filming and are punctuated with Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic) words describing the changing winter environment. These words are inscribed in the ice by the island’s youth, reflecting environmental transformations originating far away.

With summer sea-ice cover predicted to be lost from the High Arctic sometime between 2030 and 2050, the Inuit community’s winter traditions are already eroding. Are we witnessing the beginning of sikoqqinngisaannassooq – a future without sea ice?

Water, Water Everywhere: Nor any Drop to Drink
Jessica Houston

Short

Houston offers a different and more reflective take on the southern polar region. Meditating on ice, deep time, and the layered afterlives of polar exploration. Houston’s multilayered yet quietly observational work asks viewers to consider the processes of withdrawal occurring before our eyes. Rather than issuing a single ecological imperative, the film reads the present: it makes visible the material traces of exploration and extraction, the emergent behaviours of ice and ocean, and the ambivalent mix of awe and grief that follows.

Water, Water Everywhere, Nor Any Drop to Drink weaves together human and more-than-human histories in Antarctica. Filmed during a 2024 expedition, the work opens with snowflakes forming in darkness, then expands into a shifting visual landscape where glaciers calve, krill swarm, and an albatross cuts across the sky. Footage of ship rudders breaking through ice, abandoned whaling stations, and decaying outposts are layered with macro images of snow and water in transformation.

The video moves between scales and temporalities – glacial time, colonial residue, and emergent natural systems – to explore the afterlives of exploration and the fragility of ecological balance. Fractal geometries, oceanic currents, and the micro-structure of ice become metaphors for interconnectedness, self-organization, and collective change.

“The title borrows from Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a text that endures as both a cautionary tale and an ecological allegory. The Mariner’s rupture of the natural order reverberates today, as we navigate the climate crisis and its cascading effects. My hope is that this work opens a space for reflection and re-enchantment – a space where awe and grief, beauty and urgency can coexist, and where viewers might reconsider their relationship to Earth’s fragile and dynamic systems. Ultimately, the work seeks to underscore our deep interdependence with nature, where the whole is contained in every part.”

Owning the Fractures
Planetary Intimacies

Video Art

Owning the Fractures follows the creation of a time capsule, sealed within a melting glacier. Inside: a glacier crack frottage – a large-scale rubbing taken directly from the fractured ice surface.

In glacial regions, the artist’s painting practice becomes a form of sensory fieldwork. Canvases are laid onto crevasses, absorbing traces of volcanic ash and carbon-based ink – the very substances that have, since the Industrial Revolution, contributed to the glacier’s breakdown. The resulting images are not depictions, but imprints of contact.

The placement of the time capsule becomes a gesture suspended between presence and loss, now and later. As the glacier melts, the capsule – or what remains of it – will eventually reappear. The film asks: How do we relate to what is disappearing? What remains when we take rupture seriously – geologically, emotionally, politically?

Owning the Fractures is a meditation on responsibility and the limits of representation. A call to see landscape not as backdrop, but as a vulnerable, entangled system.

Elegy for a Glacier
Sarah Bachinger

Short

Elegy for a Glacier is a multimedia “poem of affection and sorrow” that stages a speculative archive of loss – an imagined afterlife in which future beings and technologies unearth the last traces of human tenderness for the more-than-human world. Sarah Bachinger frames the project around anticipatory grief and climate anxiety: the work both mourns and attempts to foster care, translating research, analytics and field practice into poetic materials that humanise data and open space for emotional response.

Bachinger’s practice is one of art, science and eco-feminist thought. Working with film, sound, photography and mixed media, she collaborates with scientists and cultural institutions to render slow environmental change legible and felt; Elegy For A Glacier has been shown in contexts from film programmes to UNESCO events and public broadcasts. The work explores anticipated loss and collective mourning.

Gone too Soon
Israel Hope Irby

Video Art