Agenda

24 Nov 2026 17:30

LECTURE | Criticism After Gaza

Sala Morelli Malcanton Marcorà – Ground Floor | Calle Contarini, Dorsoduro 3484/D, Venezia and Online

LECTURE | Criticism After Gaza

24 November 2026 | 5:30-7:00 PM CET
Sala Morelli Malcanton Marcorà (Ground Floor)

Tj Demos
Director, Center for Creative Ecologies, UC Santa Cruz and Visiting Scholar at NICHE

Chair:
Cristina Baldacci
DFBC and NICHE, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

Abstract:
What does it mean to practice art criticism after Gaza? This presentation considers how the genocide-ecocide in Gaza has extended into an assault on art’s critical capacities, including through institutional and state censorship and counterinsurgency. Yet repression never achieves totality: criticism persists through refusal, displacement, reinvention, and collective resistance. I ask what forms such criticism might take amid the collapse of the political and juridical frameworks that once authorized claims to justice. I develop this question through three interconnected challenges. First, the infrastructural turn asks how the economic, institutional, ideological, and technological systems in which art operates have become mechanisms for organizing contemporary power. Second, “the society of the psy-op” draws attention to surveillance, disinformation, and behavioral manipulation increasingly embedded in media and social life. Third, fascist AI, names the dangers of automated governance and the displacement of human judgment, raising urgent questions about thought under technological dehumanization. These challenges demand a criticism that is situated, oppositional, and materially engaged—one capable of confronting institutional contradictions, building experimental collectives, practicing mutual aid, and imagining forms of survival amid unprecedented violence, democratic breakdown, and existential threat.

Short Bio:
T. J. Demos is Professor and Chair in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture, at University of California, Santa Cruz (UC Santa Cruz), founding Director of its Center for Creative Ecologies; and Distinguished Visiting Professor in the VIAD Research Centre at the University of Johannesburg (UJ). His research, situated at the intersection of contemporary art, politics, and ecology, has resulted in numerous publications, including Radical Futurisms: Ecologies of Collapse, Chronopolitics, and Justice-to-Come (Sternberg Press, 2023), Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (EPR Murcia Cultural, 2022), and Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (Akal, 2020). Between 2019 and 2021, he directed the Mellon Foundation–supported research seminar Beyond the End of the World, a collective reflection project organized around the questions “what comes after the end of the world?” and “how can we cultivate futures of social justice from within capitalist ruins?”

Zoom Link

https://unive.zoom.us/j/81562880887?pwd=Al6JxObHNidFvHm2nkwVK9dTkTxdmu.1

ID riunione: 815 6288 0887
Passcode: c1vByG

Language

The event will be held in English

Organized by

NICHE, DFBC

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