TEHRAN – Starting last Friday, August 9th, the historic Ech Art Gallery in its beautifully renovated 100-year-old building is hosting a visual journey that combines art with environmental awareness. The group exhibition highlights global environmental crises—climate change, nature and biodiversity loss, and pollution and waste—together representing the triple planetary crisis.

Organized by the UN in Iran – the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and UN Information Centre (UNIC) – in partnership with Ech Art Gallery and ArtUnity, the exhibition titled “Beyond a Canvas: Eyes on the Work of Nature” features 36 diverse and thought-provoking works of art by 18 artists and creators.

The exhibition was originally planned to be held in commemoration of World Environment Day 2024 in June, but was postponed due to unforeseen circumstances.

Navigating through the gallery, visitors will encounter thought-provoking pieces – with accompanied information and statistics – that challenge us to reflect on our relationship with nature and our role in its conservation and preservation. Each room of the gallery serves as an individual space for one of the three global environmental crises. The rooms consist of a scene-setting description text that explains the individual environmental crisis in question, together with visually-related artworks grouped with an interesting or alarming fact or statistic about nature, and our footprint on it.

These powerful artworks are more than just visual experiences; they are calls to action, urging us to acknowledge the severity of our environmental challenges as a global community and to work collectively towards sustainable solutions.

One of the interesting features of the exhibit was also the awareness-raising video made entirely by Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools – bringing astonishing, real-life-looking footages of nature – both under pressure (with wildfires, sand and dust storms, droughts and other similar scenes) and thriving in its natural glory with flowing rivers, nourishing biodiversity and a planet in its prime. The video’s accompanied caption read “positive use of emerging technologies can not only help increase awareness on the state of our planet, but also contribute to innovative solutions to tackle the triple planetary crisis.”

A part of the Exhibition Statement also reads as:

“Across the world, humanity has pushed nature into a corner. But nature is strong, and with our active role, it can bounce back. We need an all-of-society-approach to move from living at odds with nature, to living in harmony with it. Everyone has a role to play.”

This spirit of support for the environment and for taking steps to heal our relationship with nature was also very much reflected on one of the gallery walls – called the “Sea of Solutions”. On this wall was a thought cloud, with words and phrases scattered in various sizes to highlight the sea of solutions that is at the behest of humanity across the world to tackle it; reiterating the message that we can still be part of the solution.