This two-part symposium is the work of Zoe Weldon-Yochim, a Ph.D. Candidate in Visual Studies, in collaboration with T.J. Demos, Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture and Director of the Center for Creative Ecologies, and will discuss the intersection of contemporary art, militarized ecologies, and nuclear nationalism. The panels invite overlapping and varied ways of thinking about the enduring presence of atomic violence from the perspective of the arts, and will investigate both the political networks and representations crucial to sustaining the ongoing toxic features of the nuclear age, and the political and aesthetic practices necessary to resist them.
The first half is hosted on March 5 and includes speakers Karen Barad, Jessica Hurley, and Weldon-Yochim, who will all be moderated by Demos. The second round of speakers will be Susan Schuppli, Melanie K. Yazzie (Bilagáana/Diné), and Will Wilson (Diné), moderated by Weldon-Yochim.
Weldon-Yochim expressed excitement for the panels, which includes Jessica Hurley’s research. “She is doing some very cool things in terms of analyzing literature in relation to what she's calling nuclear infrastructures, reflecting on the ways that some forms of fiction engage with nuclear technologies and their inextricable link to politics, economics, racial capitalism, and ideas of futurity.”
The speakers will cover a wide variety of topics including nuclear colonialism, decolonial politics, photography and other visual productions, quantum physics, and feminist studies. In addition to talks, the seminars will also include ample time for audience Q&As so they may engage with the speakers and their ideas.
“I think it's tough, because in a lot of ways, art often doesn't directly affect the material conditions of reality. However, that doesn't mean it can’t,” says Weldon-Yochim. “Artists like Wilson and Schuppli are creating captivating, interdisciplinary work that engages with community-led nuclear remediation and the covert nature of atomic toxicity, and Yazzie and Wilson are contributing crucial decolonial perspectives.”
Both parts of Nuclear Now will be hosted online via Zoom.
About T.J. Demos
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. His most recent book is Radical Futurisms: Ecologies of Collapse, Chronopolitics, and Justice-to-Come (2023), and he co-edited The Routledge Companion on Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change in 2021.
Meet the Speakers
Karen Barad
Karen Barad is Distinguished Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy, and History of Consciousness at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Barad's Ph.D. is in theoretical particle physics and quantum field theory. They held a tenured appointment in a physics department before moving into more interdisciplinary spaces. Barad is the author of Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University Press, 2007) and numerous articles in the fields of physics, philosophy, science studies, materialisms, and feminist theory.
Jessica Hurley
Jessica Hurley is Assistant Professor of English and affiliate faculty in Native American and Indigenous Studies, Cultural Studies, and Women and Gender Studies at George Mason University. They are the author of Infrastructures of Apocalypse: American Literature and the Nuclear Complex (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), which was awarded the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment book prize and a finalist for the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present book prize. Her research focuses on the intertangled environmental and cultural impacts of nuclearization, with a particular emphasis on the counterworldmaking power of aesthetic forms in the nuclear age.
Zoe Weldon-Yochim
Zoe Weldon-Yochim is a Ph.D. Candidate in Visual Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, whose areas of specialization include the art and visual culture of the United States, global contemporary art, and the theories and methods associated with ecocriticism. Her dissertation, “Atomic Afterlives: Visualizing Nuclear Toxicity in Art of the United States, 1979-2011,” illuminates burgeoning artistic conceptualizations of the intersection of militarism and environmentalism during and beyond the last decade of the Cold War, where particular artists mobilized varying visual grammar to consider the interconnectedness of environmental injustices and an ever-expanding U.S. military system.
Susan Schuppli
Susan Schuppli is a researcher and artist based in the UK whose work examines material evidence from war and conflict to environmental disasters and climate change. Current work is focused on learning from ice and the politics of cold. Schuppli is Professor and Director of the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths University of London where she is also an affiliate artist-researcher and Board Chair of Forensic Architecture.
Melanie K. Yazzie
Melanie K. Yazzie (Bilagáana/Diné) holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of New Mexico, and is Assistant Professor of American Indian studies at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. She specializes in violence, biopolitics, water, Navajo/American Indian history; (neo)liberalism; settler colonialism; Indigenous feminisms; Native American studies; social movements; urban Native experience; political ecology; queer Indigenous studies; Marxist theories of history, knowledge, and power; and theories of policing and the state. She is coauthor of “Red Nation Rising: From Bordertown Violence to Native Liberation” and “The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save the Earth,” both of which came out in 2021. She co-hosts and produces the podcast “Red Power Hour” and serves as lead editor for the open access journal “Decolonization.”
Will Wilson
Will Wilson’s art projects center around the continuation and transformation of customary Indigenous cultural practice. He is a Diné photographer and trans-customary artist who spent his formative years living on the Navajo Nation. Wilson studied photography, sculpture, and art history at the University of New Mexico (MFA, Photography, 2002) and Oberlin College (BA, Studio Art and Art History, 1993). In 2007, Wilson won the Native American Fine Art Fellowship from the Eiteljorg Museum, in 2010 the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award for Sculpture, in 2016 the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant for Photography and in 2020, Wilson was the Doran Artist in Residence at the Yale University Art Gallery. His work is exhibited and collected internationally. Wilson is associate professor of Photography and Media at the University of Texas at Austin.
More Info
March 5, 2024
2PM - 4PM
March 12, 2024
12PM - 2PM
Zoom
