Few things accelerate productivity quite like a pressing deadline. So with the Arctic predicted to be ice-free during the summer , it’s hardly surprising to see flurries of activity taking place in relation to the North Pole. But it’s not just scientists, researchers and oil companies; artists, too, are getting in on the act. And this week sees another, as Elizabeth Ogilvie’s opens at Ambika P3, the cavernous former construction hall of the University of Westminster’s School of Engineering in London.

The last few years have seen an increasing number of art projects exploring Earth’s poles from a diverse range of perspectives. Particularly dramatic was the 2012 film Chasing Ice, which documented the singular obsession of environmental to show the demise of glaciers in the Arctic. Prior to that, film director Werner Herzog turned to Antarctica and chose to focus not so much on the changing environment but rather its impact on the people who live there. The result, 2007’s Encounters at the End of the World, remains a claustrophobic high point in this genre.

More overtly aligned with a climate change agenda has been work like ScanLAB’s , which incorporated millimetre-perfect 3D scanning technology to capture the dimensions of a series of Arctic ice floes before “re-fabricating” them on a small scale. And There is Always Something More Important, an imposing fibreglass cast of an iceberg by . At the 2013 Venice Biennale – a major event in the contemporary art calendar – blocks of melting ice were shown simultaneously inside lightboxes by Tavares Strachan from the Bahamas and outside on the street by Stefano Cagol from Italy.

Perhaps the most engaging of the various artistic approaches to climate change was High Arctic, a multisensory installation by in 2011. It combined interactive adventure, light, darkness, poetry and sound to beguiling effect, and was a worthy inaugural exhibition for the Sammy Ofer Wing at the National Maritime Museum in London. High Arctic was the result of a collaboration with the arts and climate science foundation Cape Farewell. Founded in 2001, Cape Farewell has organised Arctic visits for some of the world’s leading artists, writers and scientists. Ian McEwan’s novel Solar is probably the best known result of these initiatives.

It is in this crowded field that Elizabeth Ogilvie now presents Out of Ice. The exhibition includes a number of video pieces that document both the beauty of the natural landscape and the harsh realities of everyday life for Inuit inhabitants of northern Greenland. Another film is made up of footage shot by a British Antarctic Survey expedition to Lake Ellsworth in Antarctica. The exhibition also boasts several large panoramic landscape photographs and a single text work. Hard to read in the dark underground space, it’s a loose interpretation of the Inuit word (a kind of person-shaped cairn) as “an internal compass that will guide us as we decide what environmental legacy we will leave”.

Most striking is a large-scale installation, which forces visitors to tread carefully around two vast pools of water that shimmer blackly amid the concrete surroundings. Above one of them, eight blocks of ice, just over half a metre long each are suspended from a lighting rig. Sporadic drips cause ripples in the water below and are reflected across two large screens. The effect is dramatic at first, then gradually calming and intriguing.

Unfortunately, the symbolism is never especially sophisticated. Out of Ice gives a strong evocation of polar existence – human and otherwise – but it contributes little that’s new, surprising, or even very thought-provoking. The accompanying programme of events, including a conference entitled Reading and Exhibiting Nature, promise more depth.

Out of Ice runs until 9 February at Ambika P3, London.

Tom Jeffreys is an art critic and edits the online magazine

The man and the moon: one of the Private Moon series of pictures (Image: Leonid Tishkov/The Arts Catalyst)

As the space race reheats, Republic of the Moon looks at our attitudes to the moon and raises the bigger issues of ownership and colonialism

, Bargehouse, London, 9 January to 2 February; plus accompanying book

IT COULD hardly be more timely. Less than a month after China’s Chang’e-3 mission placed a rover on the lunar surface, an art show, Republic of the Moon, sets out its own exploration of our natural satellite. Put together by the Arts Catalyst, an organisation whose remit is “provocative, playful, risk-taking” art-science projects, the aim is to encourage public engagement with a field usually dominated by politics, science, business and space enthusiasts.

There is a publication, too: Manifesto for a Republic of the Moon, which works with the show to provide an alternative take on the moon’s significance, focusing on wit, imagination, small-scale science and the unresolved issue of ownership .

Take the “Moon Treaty”, which came into force 30 years ago. It was framed to put the moon under international control, but as the moon race reheats, only 15 states have signed up to it. Aside from China’s rover Yutu (which means “Jade Rabbit”, a mythical pet of moon goddess Chang’e), India, Japan and South Korea also have projects. And companies are lining up, spurred by mining potential, interest in space tourism and Google’s Lunar X prize of $20 million to create a privately funded lunar rover.

These competing agendas are cleverly captured by artists Hagen Betzweiser and Sue Corke, who work together under the name WE COLONISED THE MOON. They are artists in residence at the exhibition. Entering their area, you are faced with a blackboard bearing the words: .

Elsewhere in the show, whimsy and imagination feature strongly. In Moon Goose Analogue: Lunar Migration Bird Facility, a film and elaborate control room by artist Agnes Meyer-Brandis, we see how she raised 11 geese, making them think she was their mother, and taking them on walks in a lunar-like landscape.

Similarly imaginative is Joanna Griffin’s work, Moon Vehicle, created with P. Shreekumar, an astrophysicist at the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) in Bangalore. This documents a at a top art school in the city. Students used “imagination” experiments, art, and visits to ISRO to explore the technologies used in India’s first lunar probe, Chandrayaan-1.

Underlining the importance of other kinds of thinking, Griffin writes in the Manifesto: “Moon missions risk becoming a transport system whereby [only] certain ideologies and habits of thinking from Earth are projected onto the Moon.” In other words, we are in danger of repeating the mistakes of the colonial era, but on an interplanetary scale.

“We are in danger of repeating the mistakes of the colonial era, but on an interplanetary scale”

This problem is crystallised in Liliane Lijn’s art. Her ongoing Moonmeme work consists of . Such an approach sees the moon as a blank canvas on which, she says, to “transform the meaning of an essential word”.

Translation and transformation are also key to Katie Paterson’s Earth-Moon-Earth. She turned Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata into Morse code, reflected it off the moon and deciphered it back on Earth for a self-playing baby grand piano. The result is recognisable but glitch-ridden because the moon absorbs some information in its shadows. The “moon-altered” score turns the gaps into enigmatic intervals and rests.

In Paterson’s work, the moon is an agent of change. But in Leonid Tishkov’s Private Moon, it is a fixed point. This set of photos, each coupled with a verse, tells of a relationship between a man who met the moon and stayed with “her” for the rest of his life. It is touching, but the images see the moon as alien, empty, passive; the man is the only active force.

Overall, the show is admirable for its attempts to engage the public and for suggesting that when it comes to the moon’s ownership, narratives of colonialism and gender are never far away. But it remains open to charges of anthropocentrism: as if the moon only matters in how it relates to humanity. The exhibition repeats the logic that gave us anthropogenic climate change, and, for all its emphasis on imagination and wit, fails to offer us an escape route.