Curatorial Development Program
Screening Screaming: (Human)Nature in Crisis
Applications open: April 11 until May 15, 2021
Program will start in September 2022
Warehouse421 and the Bombay Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR) invite curators from the MENASA region to propose a group exhibition, public program, or publication on the theme: ‘Screening Screaming: (Human)Nature in Crisis’.
The program will think critically about the Anthropocene and its presence in contemporary art, thought, and philosophy. Man-made ecological crisis has taken center stage in art today, depicting injustice not only between humans, but increasingly across species. At the same time, in philosophy, new realities emerge around the clock, premised on there being a Great Outdoors, a nature-in-itself independent of human beings. On these views, the universe should be a democracy of objects that includes inanimate and animate nature, human and nonhuman. But humans have failed to decolonize their relation to nature: they continue to impinge upon, crowd out, and destroy the earth in an apocalyptic present.
We’ll rethink this paradigm of contemporary Anthropocene discourse, considering how it tends to screen nature screaming, in a double sense: it projects ecological disaster anthropomorphically – through the eyes of humans grappling with their own history and experience of suffering – and thus obscures what may be wrong with how we redress not just interspecies relations in the universe, but also interhuman relations, since the two might be related, if not the same.
Successful proposals will consider and redress a potential wrong with how contemporary Anthropocene art, philosophy, and politics are being conceived, exhibited, activated, and legislated, threatening the good intentions that motivate these practices in the first place.
Three curators will be selected to fine-tune proposals that tackle these questions, to launch their exhibition, public program or book in Fall 2023.
The program will include:
- a weekly colloquium/workshop of reading, discussion, and presentation with invited and selected philosophers, historians, artists, curators, critics, and creative writers working on the theme; and,
- independent collaboration with BICAR and Warehouse421 faculty and staff, as well as a mentor of the curator’s choosing, to hone the project for launch in Fall 2023.