In the Balance and Runa Islam

First published on 18 Aug 2010. Updated on 29 Nov 2010.

Captain Planet knew it 20 years ago: our world is in peril. While we wait for five special young people with magic jewellery to turn up, the Museum of Contemporary Art is on the case. A new exhibition tackles international, national, state and local environmental concerns head-on. In the Balance: Art for a Changing World is the first environmentally themed exhibition of its scale and scope in Australia.

It takes its name from a book by that other Captain Planet, Al Gore: Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit - which addressed the pressing issue of climate change more than a decade before the film An Inconvenient Truth.

The exhibition comprises over 100 works by more than 30 (mostly local) artists and artists' collectives with a few selected international artists included to expand the debate. And it is a debate - not a diatribe. MCA senior curator Rachel Kent firmly believes in the importance of not being preachy.

"I think it's very important in an exhibition like this to not be didactic," she says. "It's certainly not intended to hector. It's very much an issues-based exhibition and it explores these issues from all angles. We have a range of artists involved in the project, some of whom are opposed to the alignment of art and activism in terms of their own practices; there are other artists in the exhibition who are quite active as activists. You get a very broad spectrum of opinion in the exhibition."

While the exhibition has its own share of artworks of the hung-on-the-wall variety, In the Balance has a strong focus on fabulous art that's outside the box - not to mention well outside the MCA.

The front lawn of St Michael's Church in Surry Hills has been transformed into a community permaculture garden, full of locally grown fruits, vegies and nuts. A mobile beehive full of tiny native stingless bees will be sat on the MCA front lawn making golden honey goodness. There's also an opportunity to join scientists, botanists and zoologists on a four-hour walking safari around the CBD, exploring the connection between the natural environment and urban landscape. In the Balance is engaging with virtual society too: local artist Diego Bonette wants you to befriend varieties of Sydney weeds on Facebook.

Or, for something completely different, you can watch Indonesian-born artist Dadang Christanto and 100 volunteers in a messy but thought-provoking protest outside the MCA at the end of October, when they'll be covering themselves in mud as a statement on the deadly 2009 Indonesian mudslides.

It's also great to see that the MCA itself is holding itself environmentally accountable. The official publication is printed with vegetable-based inks on environmentally responsible paper stock, and blogger-artist Lucas Ihlein, holed up in the Level 3 resources room, will be undertaking an ongoing meta-project: an environmental audit of the exhibition, documenting such things as paper and power usage and air transport for the freight of artworks.

It's all Art for a Changing World, as the subtitle of the exhibition tells us. But the exhibition is not only a record of the destructive changes occurring in our world - it's an uplifting display of gradually changing attitudes to the world and the optimistic desire to effect change for the better.

"I'd like to think very much that art can play an active role in raising people's awareness in challenging and perhaps affecting their view in the world in which we live," Kent says. "Artists are members of the community just like we all are - they have a range of views on a range of issues, political and environmental, and in many ways they can be catalysts; they can be spokespeople or voicepieces and hopefully contribute to change."

The Planeteers would be proud.

In the Balance isn't the only new MCA exhibition to get excited about. Upstairs, there's a new solo show by renowned British artist Runa Islam, also curated by Kent.

Islam is a Bangladesh-born film artist whose work engages with the philosophy and technology of film and representation itself. The whole space, in fact, seems like one big allegory for cinema: the lights are down and the only sounds are the incessant hum and clicking of the projector equipment, positioned around the exhibition like sculptures in their own right. "She uses space in a very structural way," says Kent. "There are a number of works constituting this exhibition, but as a whole they create one art installation. Each film represents a performance or experiment or composition within the larger installation."

It's a collection of Islam's film installations from the past seven years. These include 'Assault', in which a man is interrogated with colour and light; the time-stretching 'Be the First to See What You See as You See', which sees a young woman smashing up porcelain objects in a gallery; and 'Magical Consciousness', in which Islam films the reverse-side of a Japanese screen, capturing shadows, reflections and illuminated light. Darryn King