Event overview
Caitlin Berrigan
Imaginary Explosions: Speculative Fiction and Shifting Power Paradigms
How might deep time and interspecies communication assist us in radical planetary transformation? Building a world comprised of video, sculpture and communication instruments, Imaginary Explosions explores what other presents and futures become possible once we begin to think beyond the framework of the human. At the center of the cosmology are episodic, speculative fiction videos that follow an affiliation of transfeminist scientists operating in communication with the desires of the mineral earth to simultaneously erupt all volcanoes. As they traverse geological sites across place and time, they attempt to divest technoscientific instruments of their military and corporate power, in order to re-embody them towards alternative cosmologies. Co-conspiring with the videos’ characters—artists and scholars whose real-life work pushes the very limits of science and culture—Berrigan presents Imaginary Explosions as an act of mutual alliance, climate reparation and cosmology creation.
Berrigan’s practice has long questioned how technoscientific tools can be re-inhabited by collective imagination as well as queer and decolonial paradigms that emphasize the value of embodied forms of knowledge. Because such technologies remain necessary for us to respond effectively to massive ecosystem change, Berrigan insists that playing with how these information systems influence, build and shape our world may ultimately allow us to inhabit it differently.
Caitlin Berrigan works across performance, video, sculpture and text to engage with the intimate and embodied dimensions of power, politics and capitalism. Imaginary Explosions is the subject of a current solo show at Art in General in New York, and as an artist’s book published by Broken Dimanche Press in 2018. She is an artist, writer, and researcher affiliated with the PhD-in-Practice at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, and NYU Technology, Culture and Society.
“Imaginary Explosions: Speculative Fiction and Shifting Power Paradigms” is part of the Visual Cultures Public Programme Autumn 2019 “Living Extinctions”, co-organised by Wood Roberdeau & Lynn Turner with the support of the Critical Ecologies research stream.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 31 Oct 2019 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
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