Strategies of Aesthetics on Conflicted Borders

Within the context of the Capitalocene the essay examines the term “aesthetics” first, by considering its rather generalised contemporary applications and how such broad-brush meaning betrays a complex and sophisticated human faculty with the capacity to organise and trigger a vast array of emotive and intellectual response. The essay portrays aesthetics within the production of art as a means of sensitisation and explores how the careful consideration and strategic application of aesthetic choices in this way can play an important role as a tool for change in environmental awakening and behaviours. We reflect broadly on how aesthetic tuning has been utilised as a constructively disruptive mechanism, historically for example, in surrealist practices and demonstrate how conscious and subconsciously inflected decision making in art production today might be put to use to determine or inflect the responses of audiences in respect of environmental imperatives. In the second half of the essay, the author/artists focus specifically on the example of their 2019-21 project and exhibition Visitations to explore in greater depth the deployment of aesthetic decisions and their intended effects in the research, the making and presentation of individual works and their combined resonance in the context of their award-winning installation in Akureyri Art Museum (September 2021-January 2022).