This presentation offers a reading of the convergence of climate justice and contemporary aesthetic practice—specifically the artistic analysis of climate propagandas by Jonas Staal; the forensic racial justice investigations of Imani Jacqueline Brown and Forensic Architecture; and the Indigenous futurism of Thirza Jean Cuthand. Key takeaways from the lecture include: 1) climate emergency is multivalent, historical, and ongoing; 2) climate justice defines a framework that is necessarily comprehensive and intersectionalist, anti-systemic (anti-capitalist) and trans-environmental (linking environmental thinking to socio-political concerns); 3) climate justice solutions entail thinking beyond racial and colonial capitalism; and 4) select ecocritical examples of art join in alliance to Indigenous decolonization and abolition ecology, expanding our horizons of climate justice and emancipatory futurity.
About the Speaker
T. J. Demos writes about contemporary art and global politics. He is Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture, at University of California, Santa Cruz, and founding Director of its Center for Creative Ecologies. He researches the intersection of visual culture, radical politics, and political ecology, and is the author of numerous books, including Beyond the World’s End: Arts of Living at the Crossing (Duke, 2020); Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and Political Ecology (Sternberg, 2016); and Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today, (Sternberg, 2017). He recently co-edited The Routledge Companion on Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change (2021), was a Getty Research Institute Fellow (Spring 2020), and directed the Mellon-funded Sawyer Seminar research project Beyond the End of the World (2019-21). Demos is also Chair and Chief Curator of the Climate Collective, providing public programming related to the 2021 Climate Emergency Emergence program at the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (Maat) in Lisbon. He is presently working on a new book on radical futurisms.
