How might aesthetic practice approach climate emergency by foregrounding social justice and ecological flourishing? Addressing this urgent world-historical question, this three-day seminar will provide a forum for discussing cutting-edge speculative and politically engaging activist-artistic practice, as well as considering recent theoretical proposals for how to direct our thinking being sensing toward collective emancipation and world-building possibilities.
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Climate Justice Aesthetics
Mon, Apr 8, 20196:30 pm to 8:30 pm -
Tue, Apr 9, 20196:30 pm to 8:30 pm
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Wed, Apr 10, 20196:30 pm to 8:30 pm
T.J. Demos is Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture, at University of California, Santa Cruz, and Founder and Director of its Center for Creative Ecologies. He writes widely on the intersection of contemporary art, global politics, and ecology and is the author of numerous books, including Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (Sternberg Press, 2017); Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (Sternberg Press, 2016); The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis (Duke University Press, 2013)—winner of the College Art Association’s 2014 Frank Jewett Mather Award—and Return to the Postcolony: Spectres of Colonialism in Contemporary Art (Sternberg Press, 2013). Demos co-curated Rights of Nature: Art and Ecology in the Americas, at Nottingham Contemporary in January 2015, and organized Specters: A Ciné-Politics of Haunting, at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid in 2014. He’s currently working on a Mellon-funded research project, art exhibition, and book project dedicated to the questions “what comes after the end of the world?” and “how can we cultivate futures of social justice” within capitalist ruins?