Close of Play — Joe Habben

JOE HABBEN

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Close of Play
(2022)

There’s a grotesque character to the scenes, characters, and gestures Joe Habben captured at Glasgow’s COP26 climate change conference - it’s the shortcomings of a system. We are not only looking at corporate greenwashing: Habben shows us the precision, and the absurdity, of the aesthetics places of power have.

A hashtag: #make our planet great again. A huge, inflatable plastic bear wearing a t-shirt: together is better. An out-of-scale thumb pointing at plastic trees in a model. Huge images of the globe, working as a background for negotiations to take place.

This is what late-stage capitalism, and environmental injustice look like. Paradoxically, these images can say more about climate change than what a burnt landscape seen from above can do: it’s in places like this one that impactful, large-scale decisions are being taken. The way Habben looks at power creates the premises for us to scrutinize it, reducing the distance with something that often feels out of reach.

Words by Camilla Maresse as part of an article for PhMuseum.