Krisenkunst – Kunstkrise? Kunst und die globale Umweltkrise. Ein Gespräch mit T. J. Demos

Crisis Art—Art Crisis? Art and the Global Environmental Crisis. A Conversation with T.J. Demos

How can dystopian thinking be transformed into positive forces for a common future? There are no easy answers to this question, yet it is imperative to engage with it in order to contribute to a more sustainable and socially just world.

The publication Krisenkunst – Kunstkrise? deals with this complex topic in form of a dialogue led by young artists and academic staffs from the Acadamy of Fine Arts Leipzig and the Athens School of Fine Arts, as part of the program p o s t documenta: contemporary arts as territorial agencies, with award-winning author and theorist T.J. Demos.

Conceived as a platform for experimental modes of art education, production, and dissemination, as well as for collaborative practice and critical discourse, the p o s t documenta program established an intercultural exchange over a period of three years (2020-2022) between Leipzig and Athens and dealt with urgent challenges of the present. Among other things, this brought about the wonderful opportunity to speak with T. J. Demos about the relevance and potential of artistic creation in the context of the global environmental crisis, about raw ideas and the search for new perspectives between art, ecology, and politics. For T. J. Demos, the current climate emergency is first and foremost a political crisis that must be managed through an intersectional approach if a future worth living is to be shaped.

In the conversation about “Art and the Global Environmental Crisis,” ”world” turns out to be a key concept, evoking the most diverse meanings—parallel, anthropocentric, post-human, utopian, dystopian, future, capitalist, extinct, and constructive. This was the inspiration for a visual essay accompanying the German and Greek versions of the text: 16 collages of images illustrating iterations, fragments, potentials, and evidence of worlds and their transformations.

T.J. Demos writes about contemporary art and global politics. He is a professor in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the 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 Foundation-funded Sawyer Seminar research project Beyond the End of the World (2019-2021). 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.

p o s t documenta: contemporary arts as territorial agencies was an educational and artistic research program of the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig and the Athens School of Fine Arts, funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) in the frame of German-Greek Academic Partnerships 2020-2022.

The book is accompanied by a visual essay by Andrea Garcia Vasquez in collaboration with Brigita Kasperaite, Maria Zervoudaki, and Magdalena Zotou.