Art on the hot-button topic of climate change

BRUSSELS, Belgium -- Sixteen dinner guests sit at a long, narrow table discussing the ozone layer in a hodgepodge of languages, from English to Dutch to Japanese.

The buzz of their exchanges fills a cavernous gallery at the BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts in downtown Brussels. The work is part of the art exhibit “Melting Ice: A Hot Topic.”

The show, which runs through Jan. 6, features the works of 40 artists from 25 countries. The works are about climate change, specifically the melting of ice caps and the effect on living species.

“Environmental issues are often presented scientifically -- it removes the personal experience with the topic at hand. This exhibit is an opportunity to let the artist relate to the topic,” said Mia Hanak, head of San Francisco’s Natural World Museum, which collaborated on the exhibit with the U.N. Environment Program’s “Art for the Environment” initiative.

Hanak uses art as a catalyst to inform, educate and empower people of all languages about the environment they share.

“Denali Denial” by Chris Jordan, an American artist fascinated by consumerism, replicates Ansel Adam’s famous photograph of Mount McKinley in Alaska’s Denali National Park in a mosaic of 24,000 logos of General Motors’ Denali sport utility vehicle. The number equaled six weeks of Denali sales in 2004. Half the tiles read “Denial” instead of Denali.

The almost cartoon-like “Hermaphrodite Polar Bear” by Britain’s Gary Hume shows the animal’s footprints from below the ice. It illustrates polar bears on thin ice because wind and waterborne toxins are entering the animals’ bloodstream, causing deformities in cubs that render them sterile.

The exhibit’s European tour was already in the works before Al Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” was released in cinemas worldwide, but Hanak calls the movie “an excellent example of stimulating awareness” and acknowledges it may draw more people to the exhibit.

About 3,000 people attended the exhibition’s opening day in Oslo. In all, some 100,000 visitors saw the show in the Norwegian capital.

“Melting Ice: A Hot Topic” travels to Monaco after its run in Brussels, and, in April, goes to Chicago where it will remain through June 5.