T. J. Demos

A study of the intersecting fields of art history, ecology, visual culture, geography, and environmental politics.

Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology

Decolonizing Nature

A critique of the discourse on the Anthropocene and the creative alternatives to it to be found through the arts, sciences, and humanities. Addressing the current upswing of attention in the sciences, arts, and humanities to the new proposal that we are in a human-driven epoch called the Anthropocene, this book critically surveys that thesis and points to its limitations. It analyzes contemporary visual culture--popular science websites, remote sensing and SatNav imagery, eco-activist mobilizations, and experimental artistic projects--to consider how the term proposes more than merely a description of objective geological periodization. This book argues that the Anthropocene terminology works ideologically in support of a neoliberal financialization of nature, anthropocentric political economy, and endorsement of geoengineering as the preferred--but likely disastrous--method of approaching climate change. To democratize decisions about the world's near future, we urgently need to subject the Anthropocene thesis to critical scrutiny and develop creative alternatives in the present.

Visual Culture and Environment Today

Against the Anthropocene

Jussi Parikka

Benjamin H. Bratton

Reza Negarestani

The ecological crisis the world is currently experiencing calls for an urgent rethinking of our relationship to nature, natural resources, and the entirety of life on Earth, as well as that of humans to each other. The time has come for repurposing coexistence, aided by post-human thought and technological advancement, and for realizing that humans are merely part of, rather than the center of, our world. Potential Worlds: Planetary Memories and Eco-Fictions, published in conjunction with group shows at Zurich's Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst and Baku's YARAT Contemporary Art Space, questions forms of knowledge developed in the course of annexation of the environment and asks what ideas of nature might emerge from the current crisis and how we might perceive nature in the future. Thirty-six artists from around the world featured in this book examine the ecological and social consequences of the past and ongoing conquests of land for purposes of accumulating power and resources. Essays by Benjamin H. Bratton, T. J. Demos, Reza Negarestani, and Jussi Parikka shed light on multiple different perspectives, such as colonialism, post-humanism, ecology, and artistic adaption of new technologies, and investigate the potential future of mankind living in alliance with nature and the role of art in this undertaking as a technological, scientific, and social experiment. Concise texts on the work of the participating artists and an introduction by curators Suad Garayeva-Maleki and Heike Munder round out this illustrated volume.

Planetary Memories and Eco-Fictions

Potential Worlds

Now available in paperback, Vitamin Ph is a global, up-to-the-minute survey of new developments in contemporary photography, featuring the work of 121 living photographers who have made a fresh and innovative contribution to international art photography. Texts by significant critics, curators, art historians and creative writers representing a wide variety of perspectives comprise a book that is both a reference for the art world and an accessible guide for those with an interest in photography.

Vitamin Ph

In the wake of failed states, growing economic and political inequality, and the ongoing US- and NATO-led wars for resources, security, and economic dominance worldwide, contemporary artists are revisiting former European colonies, considering past injustices as they haunt the living yet remain repressed in European consciousness. With great timeliness, projects by Sven Augustijnen, Vincent Meessen, Zarina Bhimji, Renzo Martens, and Pieter Hugo have emerged during the fiftieth anniversary of independence for many African countries, inspiring a kind of “reverse migration”—a return to the postcolony, which drives an ethico-political as well as aesthetic set of imperatives: to learn to live with ghosts, and to do so more justly.

Specters of Colonialism in Contemporary Art

Return to the Postcolony

In Beyond the World's End T. J. Demos explores cultural practices that provide radical propositions for living in a world beset by environmental and political crises. Rethinking relationships between aesthetics and an expanded political ecology that foregrounds just futurity, Demos examines how contemporary artists are diversely addressing urgent themes, including John Akomfrah's cinematic entanglements of racial capitalism with current environmental threats, the visual politics of climate refugees in work by Forensic Architecture and Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman, and moving images of Afrofuturist climate justice in projects by Arthur Jafa and Martine Syms. Demos considers video and mixed-media art that responds to resource extraction in works by Angela Melitopoulos, Allora & Calzadilla, and Ursula Biemann, as well as the multispecies ecologies of Terike Haapoja and Public Studio. Throughout Demos contends that contemporary intersections of aesthetics and politics, as exemplified in the Standing Rock #NoDAPL campaign and the Zad's autonomous zone in France, are creating the imaginaries that will be crucial to building a socially just and flourishing future.

Arts of Living at the Crossing

Beyond the World's End

Subhankar Banerjee

Emily Eliza Scott

International in scope, this volume brings together leading and emerging voices working at the intersection of contemporary art, visual culture, activism, and climate change, and addresses key questions, such as: why and how do art and visual culture, and their ethics and values, matter with regard to a world increasingly shaped by climate breakdown? Foregrounding a decolonial and climate-justice-based approach, this book joins efforts within the environmental humanities in seeking to widen considerations of climate change as it intersects with social, political, and cultural realms. It simultaneously expands the nascent branches of ecocritical art history and visual culture, and builds toward the advancement of a robust and critical interdisciplinarity appropriate to the complex entanglements of climate change. This book will be of special interest to scholars and practitioners of contemporary art and visual culture, environmental studies, cultural geography, and political ecology.

The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change

Andrea Phillips

Cecilia Sjöholm

Reesa Greenberg

Ekaterina Degotʹ

Ever since the nineteen-nineties, curatorial discourse has revolved around the figure of the professional curator. Consequently, curatorial politics is usually considered the direct result of a curator's deliberate acts and intentions. Now, however, new institutional models and modes of exhibition practice together with key shifts in funding and collecting strategies have revealed aspects of curatorial politics over which the exhibition-maker has little or no control. The present volume presents a series of essays by noted art theorists and cultural scientists that go beyond the perspective of the individual curator to reveal these previously unexplored levels of curatorial politics.

Initial Reflections

Curating and Politics Beyond the Curator

Oreet Ashery

Rizvana Bradley

Mason Leaver-Yap

Imani Robinson

Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz

Queer death and digital afterlife: responses to Oreet Ashery's Revisiting Genesis This publication gathers artists' written responses to London-based Israeli artist Oreet Ashery's (born 1966) film Revisiting Genesis--a fictional story of a dying artist--alongside conversations with artists with critical medical conditions.

Oreet Ashery: How We Die Is How We Live Only More So

"Ever since the nineteen-nineties, curatorial discourse has revolved around the figure of the professional curator. Consequently, curatorial politics is usually considered the direct result of a curator's deliberate acts and intentions. Now, however, new institutional models and modes of exhibition practice together with key shifts in funding and collecting strategies have revealed aspects of curatorial politics over which the exhibition-maker has little or no control. The present volume presents a series of essays by noted art theorists and cultural scientists that go beyond the perspective of the individual curator to reveal these previously unexplored levels of curatorial politics." from publisher's website

Pieter Hugo

Aaron Schuman

This Must Be the Place presents nearly ten years of work by award-winning South African photographer Pieter Hugo. This book includes a selection of over 100 seminal images from before and after The Hyena & Other Men, the series that catapulted him into the spotlight in 2007. Perceptive essays by TJ Demos and Aaron Schuman situate Hugo's extraordinary career within the realm of contemporary photography and the larger historical context of his native continent, Africa. As Schuman writes, `Hugo's images offer an arresting argument for the untrustworthiness of photography, and at the same time reveal the striking vitality that remains at the heart of the medium when a practitioner bravely dares to pose difficult questions'.

This Must be the Place

T.J. Demos explores Birnbaum's pioneering development of the possibilities of video as a medium, situating it historically amidst postmodern appropriation, media analysis and feminist politics.

Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman

Dara Birnbaum

Hilde van Gelder

While each is a singular film, together they reveal Africa's postcolonial imaginary to be a zone of crisis, situated between humanitarian emergency, financial pillage, and the politics of memory on the one hand, and the fictional - but nonetheless consequential - construction of European identity on the other. Just as dominant neocolonial narratives (which all too often cover over movements for independence and social justice) are critically played out and contested in these works, so too are documentary conventions creatively reinvented by Asselberghs, Augustijnen, Martens, and Opsomer. The resulting moving images emerge as a complex site of postcolonial haunting, self-reflexive performativity, researched analysis, archival reordering, and post-documentary cinematic affect.

Figuring Postcolonial Africa and Europe in the Films of Herman Asselberghs, Sven Augustijnen, Renzo Martens, and Els Opsomer

In and Out of Brussels

Marcel Duchamp was a famous expatriate, a wanderer, living and working in Paris, NewYork, and Buenos Aires and escaping from each in turn. But exile, argues T. J. Demos in thisinnovative reading, is more than a fact in Duchamp's biography. Exile--in the artist's own words, a"spirit of expatriation"--infuses Duchamp's entire artistic practice.. Duchamp's readymadeconstructions, his installations for surrealist exhibitions in Paris and New York, and his"portable museum" (the suggestively named La boîte-en-valise), Demoswrites, all manifest, define, and exploit the terms of exile in multiple ways. Created while theartist was living variously in New York, Buenos Aires, and occupied France during the globalcatastrophes of war and fascism, these works express the anguish of displacement and celebrate thefreedom of geopolitical homelessness. The "portable museum," a suitcase containingminiature reproductions of Duchamp's works, for example, represented a complex meditation--bothcritical and joyful--on modern art's tendency toward itinerancy, whereas Duchamp's 1942 installationdesign entangling a New York gallery in a mile of string announced the dislocated status that manyexiled surrealists wished to forget. Duchamp's exile, writes Demos, defines a new ethics ofindependent life in the modern age of nationalism and advanced capitalism, offering a precursor toour own globalized world of nomadic subjects and dispersed experience.

The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp

The Migrant Image offers a sophisticated analysis of how refugee and exiled artists imagine a globalized world where borders are shifting, populations are forcibly removed from their homelands, and the gap separating the rich from the poor is growing.

T. J. Demos

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