Guest lecture with T. J. Demos, Professor in History of Art and Visual Culture, and Director at Center for Creative Ecologies: The Tears of Justice: Contemporary Art and Environmental Violence
Through three case studies (US artist jackie sumell's Solitary Garden, UK-based Forensic Architecture's Environmental Racism in Death Alley, and Palestinian artist Vivien Sansour's Heirloom Seed Library and Traveling Kitchen) the talk examines how social, environmental, and climate justice are embodied, enacted, and imagined through creative forms.
Organizer: the research group Worlding Northern Art (WONA)
Moderator: Stephanie von Spreter
This presentation explores how contemporary artistic practices interrogate and reimagine the meaning of justice, treating it not as a fixed legal or political principle but as a speculative, affective, and aesthetic terrain. Beginning with Claudia Rankine's assertion that "there is no justice... there's 'just us'," the analysis considers how art grapples with the gap between abstract ideals and lived realities. Through three case studies the talk (based on a current book in progress) examines how social, environmental, and climate justice are embodied, enacted, and imagined through creative forms. These works generate spaces for speculative reflection, historical reckoning, and collective resistance, offering not solutions but felt, situated, and often fragile practices of solidarity and survival in circumstances of late racial fascism and settler colonial genocide/ecocide. In doing so, they invite a rethinking of justice as an ongoing process rooted in memory, embodiment, and the refusal to disappear.
T. J. Demos is Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture, at University of California, Santa Cruz, founding Director of its Center for Creative Ecologies, and Distinguished Visiting Professor in the VIAD Research Centre at the University of Johannesburg. Demos is the author of several books, including Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (Sternberg Press, 2017); Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (Sternberg Press, 2016); and The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis (Duke University Press, 2013) – winner of the College Art Association’s 2014 Frank Jewett Mather Award. He 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). His most recent book, Radical Futurisms: Ecologies of Collapse, Chronopolitics, and Justice-to-Come, was published by Sternberg Press in 2023.
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