T. J. Demos: The Aesthetics and Politics of Climate Justice

In this informal talk, T. J. Demos will discuss the compelling aesthetic and political approaches and challenges in addressing climate justice. Going beyond conventional understandings of climate emergency, artists and activists—including those in this very exhibition, “Overground Resistance”—are joining the socio-political to the ecological to best address the ongoing world-historical crisis that is at once a crisis of carbon pollution and a disaster of racial and colonial capitalism.

T. J. Demos is an award-winning writer on 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.