The videos in Josh Kline’s Capture and Sequestration center four iconic commodities made from materials that powered America’s rise as the world’s preeminent military, economic, and cultural power: sugar, tobacco, cotton, and oil. Through these materials, it is possible to trace the lineage of human-made global warming and climate change back through America’s global empire and the industrial revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the most painful parts of US history–the enslavement of Africans and the theft of Indigenous land. Pulling harmful substances out of the atmosphere and burying them in the ground is routinely discussed as a possible–but highly experimental–potential solution to the climate crisis. Suck the carbon out of the air and hide it deep underground. Through advanced technology, carbon capture and sequestration magically reverses the process that caused the crisis in the first place. What would it look like to apply this approach to other toxic atmospheres?

Created as part of Kline’s recent installation Personal Responsibility–which debuted at the Whitney Museum in 2023 and is currently installed at the Museum of Contemporary Art, LosAngeles–the Capture and Sequestration videos will be shown for the first time as a stand-alone, immersive, four-channel video installation. A group of related sculptures will accompany the videos. Capture and Sequestration is part of a larger cycle of projects about the politics and economics of the Twenty-First Century.