The Journey to Reduction

A key area of review has been looking into our energy consumption. By tracking this in relation to selected exhibitions, like the Mika Rottenberg exhibition that took place over the summer of last year in our Los Angeles art complex, we have adjusted the temperature of the galleries to reduce the impact. And we now have a baseline to compare that with 2023 figures. Another major step forward has been through carbon comparisons of transportation by air versus sea versus road. We’re now able to offer reduced carbon emission alternative shipping options to our sales and exhibitions teams. This kind of thinking is getting embedded into the lexicon of the way we are operating. For me, this is really exciting as it’s something relatively new to our industry and ways of working.

HM: Climate Impact Reports, a concept created by Artists Commit and sustainability leader Laura Lupton, is a key tool used to understand the impacts of exhibition planning. This month, you’re publishing your first two years carbon reports with GCC. What have you learned from the emissions calculation process?

CM: We set ourselves the mission to reduce our carbon emissions by a minimum of 50% by 2030. After investigating all avenues, we made the most significant progress initially by reducing our energy emissions. Really this is the first place any type of organization, large or small, should explore.

HM: How is your shift to renewable energy going?

CM: Our switch to renewables has required persistence and collaboration with our local operations teams. In some locations it was pretty straightforward, for instance, in Switzerland there is already a large portion of the grid mix made up of renewables and we were already on those plans. For our independent carbon emissions calculations, we need to show certification of the renewable energy contracts we now have across the UK, New York and Hong Kong, where more renewables have recently entered the grid. I found this to be quite hopeful because that's not an individual business making a market choice. That's just what's happening in the country. As we’re about to release our 2020, 2021 and 2022 carbon footprint that we conducted through the GCC’s carbon tool we have made some progress. In the areas we are measuring through the tool which include all shipping, air travel and energy consumption we’ve made a 29% reduction overall.

HM: For me, as an artist: a gallery or a museum is part of an artistic practice. As such, artists can and should have a hand in encouraging dialogue with institutions and galleries to learn and to explore better practices together. This is why I got involved providing volunteer support. Some questions come to mind: how can we improve the way we work and learn together? This relates to a question that you brought up before: what does a sustainable art community look like? I feel like teamwork, collaboration and the decentralization of these conversations is key to shared success over time.

CM: As we are in conversation here, it does start to become more evident that solutions need to be accessible and possible for all, otherwise it doesn’t make sense. The solutions to a sustainable artworld exist—reducing air transport of people and art, reducing planned waste, carbon budgets, renewable energy and being conscious in consumption, we just need to put them into wider practice.

HM: True sustainability is often inclusive in form, humble in shape and participatory in nature, because, as humans, we learn and implement in real time. It's important that these intersectional dialogues focus on applicability and accessibility to be as DIY as possible. One example of this is Gallery Climate Coalition’s (GCC’s) carbon calculator: it is free to use and hopefully, through peer-to-peer support, carbon emissions calculations can help to visualize carbon and reduce the production of emissions in exhibitions and studio practices. My experience is that avoiding air shipments is important to this reduction effort. Can you speak about what you've learned since 2020 about sea freight, and where you feel like you're going next?

CM: I was inspired by the GCC’s sustainable shipping campaign because I thought, finally something practical we can grab hold of and track in terms of reducing emissions. It was a pretty obvious step to run an internal push at Hauser & Wirth to promote sea freight. There is a common misperception that you can only ship large, heavy sculptures by sea but when I probed a little further with a couple of colleagues, we started to realize that, with the right risk controls in place, sea freight is feasible for painting, photography and more sensitive sculpture.

There are a few simple things we’ve learnt: • If your insurer won’t cover the shipment, you can go out on the open market and obtain insurance and that’s what we did. • Timelines are crucial, so allow at least 3 months for the shipment. Although we are yet to experience any significant delays. • Making sure to invest in data loggers to track the humidity and temperature of the containers is imperative. On one shipment we communicated directly with the shipping agent and the vessel operator when we noticed temperate dips and this was corrected.

At your suggestion Haley, we are currently building a white paper on our experiences to date on sea freight. We’re keen to share what we are learning with other galleries, institutions, museums, studios, artists so that we can build a collective acceptance. I will caveat all this by saying that we know that sea freight is not without its environmental impact but due to the volume at which it operates it is surprisingly carbon efficient compared to air freight.

HM: I am glad that you will write a white paper on your sea freight experiences. The data set will be helpful for institutions and curators. One component of climate education is trying a new approach and developing an improved habit. It is important to focus on the simple lifts and concrete changes. To provide an example, the Nevada Museum of Art is making a commitment that 50% of an upcoming exhibition will be drawn from their permanent collection; this reduces overall shipping. Looking ahead, what are going to be some of your prime focuses on behalf of the artists of the gallery? What can you share about working with artists like myself?

CM: It’s a great question, Haley. Fast forward three years and I would love to share the knowledge accumulated so that more of our artists feel comfortable and empowered with sustainability measures. I think we need to prove ourselves a little bit more in terms of consistently adopting sustainable choices with our exhibitions and fairs and have a couple more years of evidence in the carbon numbers to really see the shifts. There's also more we can do as a gallery in how we work with collectors and offer lower carbon means of shipping. This is one of the big next steps because that will feed into the behavioral switch piece that we've been talking about. I think artists have a substantial role to play due to the power of their voices. Artists are so good at creating new systems and I think that's something we want to amplify as we move into the next phase of this work.

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Read the latest in a series of Climate Impact Reports (CIR) published on the artist-led sustainability platform Artists Commit. Learn more about sustainability at Hauser & Wirth.