Christina Battle Today in the news more black and brown bodies traumatized the soil is toxic the air is poison , Mississauga, 2018.
Photo : Toni Hafkenscheid, courtesy of Blackwood Gallery, Mississauga

Surviving the End of the World: Colonialism and Climate Change in the Work of Christina Battle and David Hartt

Gabrielle Moser

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Christina Battle’s 2018 series Today in the news more black and brown bodies traumatized the soil is toxic the air is poison offers us slogans for a future that has already happened. In her collages made from found photographs, Battle combines imagery of plant and animal life with succinct but urgently worded texts that describe conditions of precarity, alienation, and exposure. Consider what grows out of toxic ground floats in white text over a snowy mountainside as three seagulls — disturbingly out of place — fly by overhead. A small songbird superimposed over a cluster of multiplying organic forms, glowing pink against the white backdrop, suggests radioactive mutations and mass migrations northward as Earth rapidly heats. In Your Connection is Not Secure, foreboding mushrooms land like space invaders on the moon, evoking interplanetary colonization but also threats to cybersecurity. Battle’s billboards, in other words, describe ecological catastrophes that are already unfolding around us and raise the spectre of what is yet to come.

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