Ramona Ramlochand | Green Swans: Wildfires and Rising Seas

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Ketty Zhang

Ramona Ramlochand, “Green Swans: Wildfires and Rising Seas,” 2024

(courtesy of the Gallery)

Opening Reception: Saturday, September 21, 5 PM – 8 PM (Artist & Curator Talk at 4 PM)

In Ramona Ramlochand’s first solo exhibition in Vancouver, Green Swans: Wildfires and Rising Seas, the Montreal artist has created an entire series of new photographic and video installations confronting the devastating impact of global warming on all the planet’s living species. 

Global sea levels are rising as a direct consequence of rising earth temperatures. Inhabited by 40% of the world’s population, the Tropics is not only the zone hardest hit by global warming but also where the disastrous increase of existing economic inequalities can be easily seen. Extreme climate and weather events disproportionately affect poorer countries with the fewest resources as well as socially-vulnerable populations, for example, in the United States. Rising sea levels and dry climate are exacerbating forest fires on tropical islands because of changing ecosystems. 

However there are also unexpected climate events triggered by global warming, called “Green Swans,” that are becoming more and more frequent and intense and that are wreaking havoc on a scale never seen before. Record rising waves and drought conditions are causing increasingly disastrous wildfires that smolder year-round not only along the West Coast of the Americas but also in the Arctic Circle despite being one of the coldest areas of the planet.

Ramlochand’s Wave is a large photo-based woven tapestry installation suspended in mid-air, that, like the other works in the exhibition, exposes the dark underbelly of unsustainable toxic capitalism, allowing eco-anxiety-inducing plastics, deeply-conflicted discomforts, and unthinkable degradations to seep through to the surface. According to the artist, “the impetus for my multi-discipline installations derives from my extensive travels and focuses on the ambiguity of place, the uncertainty, fragility, and interconnectedness of the world and one’s place within it.”

Green Swans: Wildfires and Rising Seas is presented as part of Centre A’s 2024-2025 program celebrating the gallery’s 25th anniversary. The exhibition is also part of the program marking 20 years since the international 2004 conference and exhibition Mutations<>Connections: Cultural (Ex)Changes in Asian Diasporas, convened by Alice Ming Wai Jim, and for which Ramona Ramlochand was an exhibiting artist. For lecture series in 2025, visit Centre A’s website.