Agenda

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—jackie sumell’s Solitary Garden, Forensic Architecture’s Environmental Racism in Death Alley, and Vivien Sansour’s Heirloom Seed Library and Traveling Kitchen—the talk, based on T. J. Demos' current book in progress, examines how social, environmental, and climate justice are embodied, enacted, and imagined through creative forms. These works generate spaces for public reflection, historical reckoning, and collective resistance, offering not solutions but felt, situated, and often fragile practices of solidarity and survival. 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 an award-winning writer on contemporary art, global politics, and ecology. He is Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture, at University of California, Santa Cruz, and Founder and Director of its Center for Creative Ecologies. He writes widely on the intersection of contemporary art, global politics, and ecology, and his essays have appeared in magazines, journals, and catalogues worldwide. His published work centers broadly on the conjunction of art and politics, examining the ability of artistic practice to invent innovative and experimental strategies that challenge dominant social, political, and economic conventions.
Demos is the author of numerous books, including Radical Futurisms: Ecologies of Collapse, Chronopolitics, and Justice-to-Come (Sternberg Press, 2023); Beyond the World's End: Arts of Living at the Crossing (Duke University Press, 2020); Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (Sternberg Press, 2017); Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (Sternberg Press, 2016); 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—and Return to the Postcolony: Spectres of Colonialism in Contemporary Art (Sternberg Press, 2013). Earlier books include The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp (MIT Press, 2007), and Dara Birnbaum: Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (MIT Press/Afterall Books, 2010).