8th Annual Eva Holtby Lecture on Contemporary Culture

“Art as Survival” with Antony Gormley

Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 7:00 PM

Currelly Gallery, Royal Ontario Museum

EVENT VIDEO: Watch a recording of the lecture here.

DOMAIN FIELD, 2003

Antony Gormley, DOMAIN FIELD, 2003 (Installation view, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK; Commission for BALTIC, Photograph by Jerry Hardman-Jones, Leeds ©

Speaker: British artist Anthony Gormley, OBE, RA.

Moderator: Sarah Milroy, Canadian art critic

Ticket Information: www.rom.on.ca/whatson or 416-586-8000

A ROM annual program highlight, the Eva Holtby Lecture on Contemporary Culture brings powerful voices to the Museum to discuss provocative and engaging contemporary ideas. The Eva Holtby Lecture has grown to become a highly-anticipated yearly event, focusing on relevant cultural issues of international scope, and attracting the world’s most fascinating speakers.

Each year, ROM Contemporary Culture chooses an idea, issue or theme to investigate, presenting a range of exhibitions and events that open the floor for conversation, ideas and understanding our changing world.  Beginning its new season in May 2013, ROM Contemporary Culture is exploring issues of environment and climate change.  On the eve of the ROM’s 100th anniversary, we ask ourselves about the relationship between nature and culture through the lens of climate change asking:

How does the landscape change a culture?
How does culture change the landscape?


Antony Gormley

Antony Gormley is widely acclaimed for his sculptures, installations and public artworks that investigate the relationship of the human body to space. His work has developed the potential opened up by sculpture since the 1960s through a critical engagement with both his own body and those of others in a way that confronts fundamental questions of where human being stands in relation to nature and the cosmos. Gormley continually tries to identify the space of art as a place of becoming in which new behaviours, thoughts and feelings can arise. Gormley was awarded the Turner Prize in 1994, the South Bank Prize for Visual Art in 1999, the Bernhard Heiliger Award for Sculpture in 2007 and the Obayashi Prize in 2012. In 1997 he was made an Officer of the British Empire (OBE). He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, an Honorary Doctor of the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity and Jesus Colleges, Cambridge. Gormley has been a Royal Academician since 2003 and a British Museum Trustee since 2007. Antony Gormley was born in London in 1950.

Multimedia Extras

Watch video of the ROM’s 8th Annual Eva Holtby Lecture on Contemporary Culture

“Art as Survival” with Antony Gormley
Wednesday, November 20, 2013
Royal Ontario Museum



Speaker: British artist Antony Gormley, OBE, RA.

Moderator: Sarah Milroy, Canadian art critic


A ROM annual program highlight, the Eva Holtby Lecture on Contemporary Culture brings powerful voices to the Museum to discuss provocative and engaging contemporary ideas. The Eva Holtby Lecture has grown to become a highly-anticipated yearly event, focusing on relevant cultural issues of international scope, and attracting the world’s most fascinating speakers.

The lecture series is supported through the generous support of the Holtby Family.

This Clement World

This Clement World is a fiercely creative and charismatic tribute to our rapidly changing environment, as seen through the prism of Cynthia Hopkins’ deeply personal lens and wild cross-disciplinary style. Performed live with a 15-piece chorus and band, This Clement World blends outlandish fiction and original avant-folk songs with Hopkins’ own documentary footage from an Arctic expedition with Cape Farewell, infusing our global climate crisis with humour, poetics and urgency.

Learn More & Buy Tickets

Day of Dialogue

Participate in an afternoon of high-level balanced presentations and discussion about the impacts of climate change on Inuit communities with leading experts and stakeholders.

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Download the Exhibition Guide

Download your copy of the Carbon 14: Climate is Culture Festival and Exhibition Guide (PDF 14Mb).

Multimedia Extras

View our Multimedia Extras to learn more about the issues behind Carbon 14: Climate is Culture.