Oliver Ressler: Dog Days Bite Back

Oliver Ressler’s exhibition at Belvedere 21 in Vienna is centered around works on the climate crisis: The films, photographs, and installations by the Austrian artist, activist, and filmmaker originate in documentary formats and take an active stance.

Oliver Ressler’s artistic and activist practice is based on the conviction that social conditions are not given but rather can be changed. For around three decades, Ressler has been focusing on urgent aspects of democracy, the economy, migration, and ecology, highlighting structural causes as well as forms of resistance and possible courses of action. Making social alternatives conceivable and creating them is a central motif in his work. Taking a firm stance as an observer, Oliver Ressler documents acts of civil disobedience, portrays the different ways in which climate activists organize and mobilize themselves, and reflects on his role as an involved participant and artistic researcher.

Dog Days Bite Back brings together films and photographic works from recent years that address various dimensions of the climate crisis in all its economic, political, and social complexity and intertwine them with international climate justice movements. Ressler links the effects of impending climate collapse—which can now be felt across the world from the Arctic to the island state of Nauru in the Pacific Ocean—to systematic failures in climate policy and a long overdue paradigm shift in global economic systems.  

The title of the exhibition Dog Days Bite Back is borrowed from a photomontage by Ressler and refers to a statement by UN Secretary-General António Guterres about the summer of 2023 being the hottest since records began in 1940: “The dog days of summer are not just barking, they are biting.” The work is part of a series of image-text montages that combine landscape formations with the concerns of climate activists using the visual language of protest posters, encapsulating the captivating urgency of Oliver Ressler’s work.

The exhibition catalogue will be published in September 2024. Curated by Luisa Ziaja. Press contact: presse@belvedere.at / T +43 1 79 557-185. View press materials here.