Maya Kóvskaya: “Anthropocene Altermodern: Vernacular Visual Cultures & Ecological Remediations” скачать в хорошем качестве

Maya Kóvskaya: “Anthropocene Altermodern: Vernacular Visual Cultures & Ecological Remediations”

This event launches the "Multispecies Worldmaking Possibilities in the More-Than-Human Anthropocene" 2021 Speaker Series organised by AMOR MUNDI Multispecies Ecological Worldmaking Lab. TALK ABSTRACT This talk by Maya Kóvskaya, who has been an art critic, curator for 15 years, as well as a scholar of visual culture and the Anthropocene, explores the intersection of art, ecology, and the Anthropocene in India. The talk explores the power of art in contemporary artists’ ecological remediations and “altermodern” resistance to the Anthropocene in their work, looking at seminal contemporary Indian artists, including Ravi Agarwal, Sheba Chhachhi, Desire Machine Collective, Navjot Altaf, Shweta Bhattad with the Gram Art Project, and the late, great Tushar Joag. Art has the power to shatter familiar ways of seeing and offer new imaginaries to help us rethink what it means to be human in a more-than-human world at a time of unfolding planetary ecological crisis that threatens the stability of life as we know it and endangers us all. Art can help us to “devisualize” dominant normative aesthetic paradigms that shape what seems natural, normal, even right, and desirable, and decolonize our worldmaking practices of everyday life (Mirzoeff 2021). Art can offer us critical reframings and embodied experiences of the "intra-actional" (Barad 2012) agential forces that co-make our multispecies world, and show us ways to see and know ourselves anew through these encounters. These questions of decolonizing and devisualizing the Anthropocene in the Indian context—where extreme Anthropocene violence is unfolding. The talk explores “altermodern” approaches (Bourriaud 2005, 2009; Enwezor 2010) to decolonizing and “devisualizing” (Mirzoeff 2021) the Anthropocene from within the “situated knowledges” (Haraway 1988) of ecologically engaged Indian contemporary art and vernacular visual cultural practices (Mercer 2007). “Altermodern” resistance is emergent “in the work of art itself,” argued the late Okwui Enwezor. Art opens up a space for “radical gesture[s] of refusal and disobedience...in the ethical and epistemological sense.” These ethical and epistemological stances, gestures, and strategies embody what he characterized as deviations “from the limits placed on life and subjectivity by the instrumental violence of modernity” (Enwezor 2010). Thus the "altermodern" modality offers both alternatives to and alterations of the dominant forms of modernity. The artworks shared in the talk instantiate resistance to the Anthropocene condition, enacting what Enwezor described as the “dispersal of the universal,” a “refusal of the monolithic,” and “rebellion against monoculturalism” that demand “a reconceptualization of the structures of legitimation that follow in their wake” (Enwezor 2010). In this spirit, a study of ecological art “against the Anthropocene” (Demos 2017) can be understood as an enactment of altermodern resistance to the asymmetrical necropolitical violence (Mbembe 2019) that the Anthropocene instantiates in post-colonial India. Altermodern resistance through “devisualization” means “undoing the processes of classification, separation and aestheticization” of the visual cultural regimes of the Anthropocene (Mirzoeff 2021). In this way, ecological remediations through art can help break the "complexes of visuality" and power that normalize and naturalize the ontologically constitutive radical rupture of “Human” from "Animal" and “Nature” that has shaped the dominant understandings of our shared reality and mediates our responses to the planetary crisis we now must face. Such art asks us to re-envision ourselves and the world that we co-make with myriad, entangled other Terran beings and forces. After their talk Maya Kóvskaya will be joined by two of the main artists featured in the talk—Sheba Chhachhi and Ravi Agarwal—as well as Ecophilosopher and curator Timothy Morton, and Multispecies Storyteller and artist formerly based in Goa, India, Ciclón Olivares, for an informal roundtable discussion of the entanglement of arts, ecologies, and Anthropocenes, and Q&A with the audience. SPEAKER SERIES This event is part of an ongoing 2021 Speaker Series: ​"Arts, Ecologies, and Anthropocenes: Voices and Visions from India" SPEAKER SERIES ORGANIZER AMOR MUNDI Multispecies Ecological Worldmaking Lab   / amormundilab   The AMOR MUNDI Multispecies Ecological Worldmaking Lab is an intersectional multidisciplinary research initiative in the Global South, bringing from disciplines including ecophilosophy, animal and critical life studies, geography, anthropology, political and social science, arts & humanities, together with scholars in the natural sciences into research collaborations investigating how human and more-than-human worldmaking are mutually entangled, fostering symbiopoesis through cross-disciplinary approaches, joint publications, workshops, art/science exhibitions, and pedagogy.