*** Welcome to piglix ***

T.J. Demos


T.J. Demos is an art historian and cultural critic who writes on contemporary art and visual culture, particularly in relation to globalization, politics, migration and ecology. Currently a Professor in the Department of History of Art and Visual Culture (HAVC) at UC Santa Cruz, and the founding director of the Center for Creative Ecologies, he is the author of several books, including 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), and Return to the Postcolony: Spectres of Colonialism in Contemporary Art (Sternberg Press, 2013). Previous to his current appointment, Demos taught at University College London between 2005-2015.

Demos has also curated a number of art exhibitions, including Rights of Nature: Art and Ecology in the Americas in 2010 and Uneven Geographies: Art and Globalisation in 2015, both at Nottingham Contemporary (both co-curated with Alex Farqharson); Specters: A Cinema of Haunting at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid in 2014; and Zones of Conflict, at Pratt Manhattan Gallery in New York in 2008.

Demos received his PhD in 2000 from Columbia University. His first book, which emerged from his doctoral thesis, was The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp (MIT Press, 2007). It situates Duchamp’s mixed-media projects, such as La Boîte-en-valise, and his installations, including the 1938 Surrealist exhibition in Paris, in the context of the early twentieth century’s world wars and nationalist formations. The text argues that Duchamp’s practice brought about an aesthetic negotiation of the experiences of geopolitical dislocation.

Demos’ work focuses on the intersection of contemporary art and politics (particularly in the areas of photography and moving-image art), and considers the ways that art is capable of inventing creative and critical approaches that analyze, defy, and provide alternatives to reigning political, social, and economic forms of neoliberal globalization. His recent writing investigates contemporary art’s relation to environmental crisis, and he recently guest-edited a special issue of the journal Third Text on "Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology" (no. 120, January 2013), and has written several essays on the subject, such as “The Post-Natural Condition” in Artforum


...
Wikipedia

...