Beyond the World’s End
March 6, 2020 – June 21, 2020
Museum of Art and History (MAH), Santa Cruz
In our contemporary moment, apocalyptic narratives have become omnipresent—but what comes after? And how can we get there in ways that are socially just and ecologically sustainable? This exhibition surveys a select range of artistic proposals variously addressing the end of the world and what comes after. The exhibition is part of a Mellon-funded lecture series at UC Santa Cruz that will take place during 2019-20, overseen by T. J. Demos, Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture and Director of the Center for Creative Ecologies.
Artists: Amy Balkin; Laurie Palmer; Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman; Allora & Calzadilla; Future Farmers; Super Futures Haunt Qollective; Krista Franklin; Helen and Newton Harrison; Rasquache Collective
Manifesta 13 Marseille
August 28, 2020 – November 29, 2020
Museum d’histoire naturelle, Marseille
War ecologies call forth not just mutuality but collapse, survival within violence. Conflict involves corporate extraction and militarised assaults on environments and environmentalists, while multispecies life and coexistence fall under grave threat. In its curatorial presentation, the Center for Creative Ecologies offers two artistic case studies asking what kind of pluriverse is possible in the face of different kinds of socioecological violence? The first study addresses the criminalisation of nonhuman life in Putumayo, southern Colombia by Hannah Meszaros Martin; the other considers sci-fi surrealism and extinction in Mar Menor, a saltwater lagoon in southeastern Spain, by Isabelle Carbonell. These comprise part of the Center’s ongoing research project Beyond the End of the World, which seeks out spaces of hope emerging from geographies of despair. War ecologies identify not only neoliberal enterprises using climate breakdown to introduce authoritarian politics, but also struggles – human and more-than-human – for ways to transcend the forces of socio-economic inequality and politico-environmental calamity.
Artists: Isabelle Carbonell, Hannah Mezaros Martin, in further collaboration with Ñambi Rimai Pan Amazon Media Collective, Yésica Flores Arroyo and Edinson Arroyo Mora.
We Are Not Aliens: Arthur Jafa, Martine Syms, and Afro-Futurism 2.0
TBD
Sesnon Gallery, UC Santa Cruz
Attached to the Mellon-funded Sawyer Seminar dedicated to the research subject “Beyond the End of the World,” directed by T. J. Demos during the 2019-20 academic year, this exhibition assembles select artistic projects that investigate futures of justice founded in the violence of contemporary racism and violence. Jafa’s startling and moving video Love is the Message, the Message is Death, offers a short account of antiblack police violence as well as speculative visions of African-American emancipation, collective resistance, and poetic love, and includes a short passage of artist Martine Syms delivering her “Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto,” in which she states “We are not aliens” (critically distancing herself from earlier formulations of Afro-futurism). The show will reproduce her text as an artistic wall painting, and also include a KCET video that explores the ideas behind the Manifesto, laying out visions of African-American creativity dedicated to the radical imagination of a coming world of liberation.
