In Beyond the World's End, a talk drawing from his latest book, Beyond the World's End: Arts of Living at the Crossing (2020), T. J. Demos will explore 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 the entanglements of racial capitalism with current environmental threats, the visual politics of climate refugees, art that responds to resource extraction and that evokes Afrofuturist climate justice and multispecies ecologies. Throughout, Demos contends that contemporary intersections of aesthetics and politics, as exemplified in the Indigenous uprising of Standing Rock’s #NoDAPL, are creating the imaginaries that will be crucial to building a socially just and flourishing future.
The talk is part of the Worldbuilding in the Wake monthly series curated by Kareem Estefan within the context of the Postcolonial Ecologies exhibition project. The talk will be in English. Simultaneous translation to Arabic will be available on Zoom.
Image: Arthur Jafa, “Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death” 2016.