Global Futures Speaker Series - TJ Demos Event

Overview:

This presentation will consider how various environmental crises (distinct but not unrelated) are increasingly bringing about forced displacements of life from different territories—including the Maldives, the Arctic, and Fukushima. These contexts offer ways of approaching the intertwinement of political ecology, environmental crisis, forced migration, and artistic/activist aesthetics in the current global moment, a nexus that appears posed to become only more critical in the near future.

Biography:

T.J. Demos is critic and Reader in the Department of Art History, University College London. He writes on contemporary art and politics, and is the author, most recently, of The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis (Duke University Press, 2013), and Return to the Postcolony: Spectres of Colonialism in Contemporary Art (Sternberg Press, 2013). He recently guest edited a special issue of Third Text (no. 120, 2013) on the subject of “Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology,” and is currently at work on a book on the subject for Sternberg Press.