How Does the World End (for Others)? Score for New York

Beate Geissler & Oliver Sann

May 16 - June 22, 2024

Science fiction often serves as a lens through which societal fears and real-world issues are explored in imaginative and sometimes allegorical ways. Cli-fi, a climate-based subgenera of Sci-fi, explores the impacts of climate change on society and the environment, often extrapolating from current environmental issues to depict possible futures shaped by climate change. These often include the depletion of natural resources, climate catastrophe, drought, famine, and overpopulation, the last of which frequently sets each story in densely populated cities such as New York.

The center of the exhibition features a long table with a cluster of gourds, symbolizing in many cultures both life and death, empty vessels ready to accept either connection hovering a floor above glass lab vials whose clinical curves evoke man made structures, science, cities. These are punctuated by “fragments” from Cli-fi authors, arranged in the chronology of when the story is set beginning with the most recent and then progressing forward. The central theme here is time, a “history” of our collective fears and worst case scenarios, predicting and recapping eras that still feel within reach. How Does the World End (for Others)? tackles the current climate change dilemma as speculation placed in the perspective of the known; texts written in their zeitgeist beginning with the imagined now. 

Artists Beate Geissler and Oliver Sann take the first “fragment” from the 1973 movie Soylent Green, possibly the most popular story in the Cli-fi genre. Set in Manhattan in 2022, it presents a dystopian example of a society that loses it’s morality in the wake of extreme circumstances brought about by the almost total loss of natural resources, the last of which is reserved for the very wealthy. While devastating environmental change should humble the solipsism of humankind, it proves the opposite as its central struggle focuses on the powers that be trying to suppress the truth behind the contents of the titular substance.

Annette Kuhn states in her analysis of the cultural significance of science-fiction that “sci-fi movies relate to the social order through the mediation of ideologies, society’s representations of itself in and for itself – that films speak, enact, even produce certain ideologies which cannot always be read directly off films’ surface contents” Many cli-fi works highlight the unequal distribution of environmental risks and explore themes such as environmental justice, community resilience, and activism. While climate change has become the burden of all, in this shared responsibility, we shift focus from the industries that created and perpetuate it. In this, we accept our fate as the Soylent Green masses feasting on our own flesh as we slowly fade into extinction.

Beate Geissler (b. 1970, Neuendettelsau, Germany) and  Oliver Sann (b.1968 born in Düsseldorf, Germany) have been working collaboratively since 1996. Their work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in museums, galleries, and alternative spaces, including: the