MAM Screen 023: Josh Kline

The 23rd edition of the MAM Screen presents the Japan premiere of two video works by artist Josh Kline - Capture and Sequestration: Gasoline (2023) and Capture and Sequestration: Cigarettes (2023) - from his larger project about the climate crisis. Together, the works examine everyday acts of combustion, such as burning gasoline and smoking a cigarette, as points of access to the historical systems of extraction, empire, and industrialization that underpin the climate crisis. The title refers to carbon capture and sequestration, an experimental strategy proposed as a technological solution to the climate crisis: extracting carbon from the atmosphere and burying it underground. Kline asks what it might mean to apply this logic to other toxic atmospheres - social, political, historical - that cannot be so easily contained. Kline’s full suite of Capture and Sequestration videos centers on foundational commodities such as oil, tobacco, sugar, and cotton, whose production and circulation powered the rise of the United States as a military, economic, and cultural empire. Through these materials, the lineage of human-made climate change can be traced back through industrialization to the violent foundations of that power: the enslavement of Africans and the theft of Indigenous land. In these two works, oil and tobacco become condensed symbols of that longer history, replayed through small, controlled gestures of burning.